There is far too little non-con snuff on this board, so I decided to post some stuff and hopefully inspire and/or attract some non-con fans here. I'd also like to say that violence against women and sexual assault are very big problems in society, and these fantasies are not meant to condone or perpetrate those issues in any way.

Julie is a character that embodies just about everything I enjoy in my fantasy victims, and although her personality may vary slightly from story to story, she remains fairly consistent. I've penned quite a few of her demises, and hopefully some of these tales you'll also find enjoyable. Some are reposts I've shared here previously, and some are new.

Well here's a short, older story that I'm not particularly proud of, but I rewrote a few lines and completely rewrote the ending to stick with the theme of Julie fighting for her life while being fucked up, and it shows off that legendary durability.

"Oh I know, right? When is this shit gonna fucking end?" Erika agreed.

Two periods remained before they earned their afternoon reprieve, and Julie couldn't wait for the bus ride home. She had received a curbside basketball goal for her seventeenth birthday the previous weekend, and had spent hours on end wearing out the net. In her head she was already there, dribbling up and down the street outside her house, draining jumpers, raining down threes, and sinking free throws. In reality, sixth period Chemistry had just gotten underway, and Mrs. Phelps was lecturing them about protons and electrons or some tedious bullshit which Julie could not be less concerned with.

"You wanna come over and shoot some hoops today?"

Erika frowned. "Dude, I wish, freaking Garcia loaded us up with a freaking shit ton of homework."

"Sure, sure, you just don't want me to school you, bitch."

Erika opened her mouth, feigning shock, and replied with the hint of a smile, "What-ever, bitch."

Julie giggled. "It's okay. You don't have to be ashamed. Nobody likes getting their ass handed to them."

"Puh-lease, girl. You don't even want none."

"Yeah, okay, so is that a yes?"

"I really can't."

"Just come over for an hour or two and do your fucking homework later."

"Julie, you don't understand, this shit is gonna take all damn night."

"Ladies!" Mrs. Phelps shouted at them. "Do you have something to share with the rest of the class?"

"No more interruptions, please." Before she could resume her lecture, however, she suffered one final interruption. Three men clad in military style fatigues stormed into the classroom unannounced, their faces hidden behind ski masks. One stood well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a husky build and an AK-47 cradled in his arms, one was unremarkable except for his tan ski mask, which contrasted with the black masks of his fellow intruders, and the submachine gun held at hip level and the pistol strapped to his back, and the third was a bit on the portly side and carried a tripod and a movie camera. The big guy and Tan Ski Mask Guy promptly opened fire on the Chemistry teacher, riddling her with bullets.

Things seemed to slow down for Julie at that point. She heard the distinct cries of each of her classmates as they screamed in horror, the screeching of chairs as they were hastily emptied, the clatter of shells falling on the marble floor tiles. She could hear the rattle of gun fire outside, in the hallways or other classrooms throughout the school. She heard Erika gasp, "oh shit," as she clamped her hand around Julie's arm like a vice, and she smelled the bitter odor of urine as someone pissed his or herself.

When the shooting stopped, Mrs. Phelps stumbled back against the dry erase board and toppled over backwards. Amazingly, despite being shot dozens of times, she still managed to lift her head and babble something incoherent to the class before lying back down and dying. A few more sporadic gunshots rang out from various locations in the school, and then all that could be heard was the whimpering of Julie's Chemistry class.

In the relative silence the big guy stepped forward to address them. "Everybody return to your seats and keep quiet. If your government cooperates, this will all be over soon." Julie hadn't even bothered to vacate her seat, as she had seen little point in cowering in a corner that offered no escape or protection. Erika had risen to her feet, but she had remained at Julie's side, her hand latched firmly around Julie's right forearm. When she loosened her grip a red ring remained, marking the flesh she had squeezed.

Julie sat calmly as her peers returned shakily to their chairs, and Erika eased back into hers. "Julie, what the fuck?" Erika whispered, but Julie quickly shushed her. Their captors had instructed them to remain quiet, and so she would. She had no desire to end up like Mrs. Phelps.

"Julie!" Erika said again, and this time it wasn't Julie who shushed her, but rather their unwelcome guests. Erika heeded their warning. Aside from a few sniffles and sobs from her classmates, an uncomfortable silence filled the room, palpable enough to choke on.

After nearly half an hour of quiet time, another masked stranger entered the room and said something to the other gunmen in a language Julie didn't recognize. They acknowledged him with gruff noises and nearly imperceptible nods, and he disappeared back into the hallway. The tallest of the three then approached Erika's desk and pulled her to her feet. The girl squawked and struggled but she was easily handled by the well built henchman, and he tossed her against the wall and drilled her in the her chest with several rounds from his AK while the portly man filmed it.

This was enough to elicit a startled cry from Julie, and there were several screams from the rest of the class. It got Julie thinking that obedience and patience might not pan out, and perhaps it was time to take action. Her gaze met Erika's, and looking into the eyes of her dying friend she saw the terrible hopelessness of death. It was not an experience Julie wanted to share.

While the three men's attention was focused on the fatally wounded teenager, Julie slipped out of her chair like liquid lightning and swiped the big guy's pistol from his back holster. Before he could completely turn around she had put a bullet in his brain, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes. She turned the gun on the guy in the tan ski mask and fired just as he squeezed the trigger on his SMG, and while her shot struck her target in the face, his rounds went wide, two of them barely managing to clip Julie in her left shoulder and upper bicep. She twisted with the impact but quickly recovered, then took aim at the camera man.

The portly man who had appeared to be unarmed found a small revolver in the pocket of his trousers and was in the process of raising it when Julie plugged him in the chest. He went down, but as he fell he returned fire, putting a hole in Julie's right thigh. Julie cried out and rattled off four more shots into the fallen camera man, neutralizing the threat.

"Holy shit," she grunted, then bent over at the waist and vomited on her shoes.

"You got shot," Barry told her. Barry was a shy kid who always sat close to Julie when they had class together, so he could ogle her.

Julie looked at him, then looked at her shoulder and her leg and nodded. She wore faded and bleached blue jeans, which provided a stark contrast for the scarlet blood trickling down her thigh, and a sleeveless white cotton half shirt, leaving her softly sloping square shoulders, smoothly rounded arms, and soft, flat tummy bare, so the wounds were clearly visible. "Yeah, three times."

"Doesn't it hurt?" Barry asked.

"Fuck yeah, it fucking hurts. So who wants to get the fuck out of here?" When nobody made a move to join her, Julie stared at them all in bewilderment. "Seriously? Nobody wants to escape?"

"There's more of them out there, Julie," Gracie told her.

"Yeah, and if you stay here they're gonna find you."

"If we go out there they can find us, too, and they'll kill us."

"You think staying in your seats will protect you? Look at Erika, for fuck's sake." Erika was still breathing, although she was fading fast. Her mortal wounds were not enough to garner Julie any followers, however. "Whatever, I'm not waiting around for these fuckers to kill me." Julie cast a scornful glance around the classroom, then hobbled out into the hallway.

The halls appeared to be deserted, which was a stroke of luck for Julie. Leaning against the wall for support, she was able to limp along while keeping most of her weight off her right leg. Eighty yards separated Mrs. Phelps' classroom from the front doors of the school, and Julie had just passed the halfway point when a gunshot boomed behind her. She felt the slug punch into her left buttock and rip out the front of her left hip, and she sunk to her knees. Another round quickly followed the first, this time striking her in the lower back, an inch to the left of her spine, and exiting to the left of her navel. An alarming amount of blood sprayed the wall and the tiled floor ahead of her, but Julie just bit her lip and twisted around to shoot back.

Her attacker was only about twenty feet behind her, and the first time she squeezed the trigger she drilled him square in the chest. Unfortunately the Beretta she wielded lacked stopping power, and she suffered another gun shot wound just below her right collar bone before she emptied out the clip, putting eight more rounds into the poor, hapless soul who made the ill-fated decision to fire on her.

Having vanquished her fourth foe, Julie leaned back against the wall and sighed, "Shit." Shot six times. I've been fucking shot six fucking times! The good news was that most of the wounds did not appear to be life threatening, except for the gaping hole in her tummy that was spurting blood like a water fountain. If she could somehow slow the bleeding though, maybe she'd be alright. Nothing vital had been damaged. She might need her intestines stitched up a bit, but that was doable.

She was clutching her belly and working up the courage to stand when she heard another gunshot ring out down the hallway and felt a sudden pressure in her upper abdomen. A fresh bullet hole had appeared just below her rib cage on the left side of her body, and she spotted the person responsible twenty yards away and closing. Although she knew it was hopeless, she lifted her gun and squeezed the trigger, the firing pin falling on an empty chamber. Hearing the dry click, Julie tossed the gun and pleaded for mercy. "Please, help me! I don't wanna die." Blood spattered from her lips as she spoke. So much for keeping my vital organs in tact.

Instead of help her pursuer gave her another bullet hole in her gut, plugging her a couple inches above and slightly left of her belly button.

"Oooof," Julie groaned. She rolled onto her hands and knees and started crawling away, and she caught another round in the back, just below her left shoulder blade. "Ahhh." She reared up and another bullet bit into the left side of her back. "Uhhnn." Julie reached awkwardly around behind herself with her left hand, and ended up leaning back against the wall again.

Her beautiful blue eyes looked up to find the hollow end of a gun barrel hovering in front of her face, and she squealed quietly. "Please, I'll do anything. I'll suck your dick, just don't kill me."

"Alright. Suck it, bitch." When the terrorist grabbed a handful of her soft, brown, shoulder-length hair and exposed his throbbing, erect penis, Julie didn't hesitate. Surprisingly, she felt no shame for her begging, or for granting sexual favors in exchange for her life. Evidently her need to live far outweighed her self respect. Perhaps the shame would come later, but she could live with a bit of shame. She couldn't live with anything if she was dead.

He kept the pistol pointed at her temple, and her every movement brought her excruciating agony, but as the man attached to the penis in her mouth grew closer and closer to climaxing, his focus was lost. Julie surprised herself with her quickness as her left hand moved faster than the blink of an eye, gripping the barrel of the gun and pushing it away, and her perfect teeth clamped down hard. With a ripping motion, turning her head and grinding her teeth, she severed the man's cock.

She spat the grotesque piece of meat out and saw that she now held the pistol, as the dickless man screeched in horror and gripped his crotch. Julie put him out of his misery with a bullet in his forehead. She swiped the blood from her face and mouth with the back of her hands, then went back to work trying to stand up. The exit was only thirty yards away. Outside there were no doubt law enforcement officers and emergency personnel waiting to assist. She could make it. She had to.

It was incredible how much effort she had to exert, how sapped her strength was, but she pushed against the wall and drew upon every ounce of her considerable will power, until at last she was back on her feet. Now she just needed to walk. She thought the first step would be the most difficult, but she soon found the second to be just as trying, if not more so. As she contemplated the third step, she had to fight a bout of dizziness. As if simply walking with ten gun shot wounds in her body wasn't enough, her situation quickly worsened.

There were three classroom doors along the hallway prior to her intended destination, two on the left and one on the right. To her horror an armed man came out of one on of the doors on the left and another from the door on the right, almost simultaneously. The man to her left carried an uzi .9 mm, and the other held a rifle like the one that had been used to kill Erika. Julie targeted the man on the right first, and thanks to the element of surprise she caught him unawares and took off the top of his skull.

The rattattattat of automatic gunfire erupted from her left, and a bullet made it's way into the left side of her midriff, but the man's aim was sporadic as he shot from the hip, and she could hear the impact of numerous bullets striking the wall behind her, and she felt the sting of chips and debris flying off the tiles and pummeling her soft flesh. She turned towards him, raising her gun, and three bullets punched into her tummy before she could fire. One just to the right of her navel, another about an inch further to the right, and the third about an inch and a half above the second.

Her aim was spoiled, and her bullet grazed the man's left shoulder. The submachine gun continued to jump in the man's hands like a living thing, and two bullets found their way into the right side of Julie's chest, and another took a piece of flesh off the right side of her neck. A split second before another slug struck Julie in her right shoulder, she got off a well aimed shot that hit her foe center mass.

This knocked him off balance and his bullets went far wide of her, but as he slumped to the floor he managed to reposition his weapon and send a burst of lead into Julie's right thigh, four shots in total ripping into her. "Bastard!" she cursed him as she leaned against the wall, clutching her leg with her free hand and struggling to remain upright, and then she shot the fucker in the face.

As things quieted down and the stench of gunpowder and blood hung in the air, Julie took a moment to compose herself and assess the situation. She looked down at her bullet riddled torso and realized she had been shot so many times so quickly that she had lost count of the wounds, but her heart was still beating and she had breath in her lungs, so she had to keep fighting. Walking had an added challenge now, with her left hip in ruins and her right quads punctured in five different places, but she used the wall as a brace and stumbled towards the exit.

She kept expecting someone else to come out of the classrooms ahead of her, and because of that she tried to keep the pistol at the ready, but when she cleared ten feet and that didn't happen, she began to wonder if she had thinned their ranks so much that they were running out of men to send after her. That was an encouraging thought. "Fuck with Julie, you get the horns," she muttered to herself, and giggled. What she didn't expect was for the doors she was fighting so hard to reach to suddenly spring open, and a SWAT team to come pouring through them.

A huge sense of relief washed over Julie, and she pushed off the wall and held out her arms to accept her saviors, forgetting she still held the pistol. Instead of saving her, four of the cops that came rushing into the school opened fire on her. Two MP5 submachine guns, a Colt M4 carbine, and a Remington 870 12 gauge lit her up all at once, very quickly turning her torso into a human sieve.

Two 12 gauge shells were expended, all twenty-four of the balls striking her first in the stomach, then in the right breast, most of the shot making its way clean through her body. Twelve 5.56 mm rounds stitched her from the belly up to her left shoulder, and twenty-one .40 caliber Smith and Wesson bullets punched through her gut, her chest, her shoulders, and her upper arms. Julie dropped the gun she held and fell to her knees, her blue eyes wide and staring.

Her soft buttocks came down on her heels, and she watched, dumbfounded as the SWAT team moved smooth as silk through the hallway, sweeping the rooms and delivering their brand of swift justice to whatever terrorists still opposed them. A team of eight streaked past her with barely a second glance, and she guessed they'd soon be in the room she had cleared all by herself. She wondered if it was too late to save Erika, and figured it probably was.

As she finally collapsed on her back and stared up at the ceiling, she wondered if the SWAT team would have still come in when they did if she hadn't tried to fight her way out. Would she have been safe if she had just stayed in her seat? Could she have been saved if she hadn't been so careless with her gun? She'd never know the answers to these questions, but they plagued her as she faded off into an eternity of nothingness.

I remember reading that story with the terrorists a few years ago somewhere, perhaps it was on Deadskirts.

I certainly love this rewriting you did with it, and how you handled Julie in it, like you said yourself; fighting hard and showing off her legendary durability.That's definitely my favorite aspect of your Julie. She's such a damn tough cookie, impossibly so, it's always fun to read about her fighting and struggling through the most impossible situations.

I was almost hoping for one of the SWAT guys to notice her still barely alive as the rest of them swept the building, and being amazed by her tenacity to live as he emptied the rest of his magazine into her... No, wait... still moving; Make that two magazines.

Yeah, it was deadskirts. I haven’t posted stories there in a long time because I think my style is a little too brutal and blood-thirsty for that crowd, and I like to imagine adolescent girls biting the dust sometimes (DS has rules to “protect” fictional characters under the age of 18, or something). The idea of someone who is emotionally immature and just starting to come into their own having everything taken from them strikes a cord with me.

I’m glad others appreciate the buckets of bullets approach I often take with Julie. Sometimes I start a story thinking she’ll just be shot once or twice or three times, but I can never stop there and I often feel like I overdo it.

That said, I’m working on a story that goes in a slightly different direction, where she doesn’t fight back and she doesn’t take multiple clips before going down. Hopefully there is still an audience for that here.

Julie was three years old when the final rebel states fell to the Global Order, and the world was united at last. She remembered none of the atrocities committed during that time of strife, and her history classes and news programs conveniently omitted that information.

All she knew was humanity had finally achieved world peace, and for nine years life was calm, easy, and prosperous in her region. In fact, in many ways it was a wonderful time to be alive. Medical breakthroughs had completely eradicated disease and illness, and even the aging process had been defeated with genetic engineering. The oldest known human had lived one hundred and seventy-eight years, and showed no signs of stopping. Barring a violent end, people had no reason to believe they'd ever die.

The downside to that was over population. Advancements in the food industry had made feeding the masses easier, and water was being purified at amazing rates, but a lack of housing and clothing made living conditions in some regions nearly unbearable. To combat this, even petty crime often carried a death sentence, and more severe sentences involved wiping out entire bloodlines, so that lengthy life expectancy could be cut terribly short for those struggling to make ends meet. Fortunately for Julie, her family and her region were well off.

When she was twelve years old, that security suddenly changed. Executions for petty crimes were no longer enough to cull the steadily increasing population, so new culling laws were passed. A select group of citizens would be issued culling cards, and they would be responsible for culling five people of their choosing each year. They were permitted to use any execution method they wished, but the executions must be public, with plenty of witnesses so there could be no doubts as to what took place. Interfering with a culling meant a brutal end to you and your entire bloodline, all the way down to second cousins.

There were also laws protecting cullers and their families from other cullers, laws protecting government officials, laws protecting children under the age of sixteen, and laws preventing cullers from using their power for extortion. This meant a culler must complete a background check on anyone they planned to cull, or risk the ultimate punishment. A culler would also be executed should they fail to complete their civic duty of five cullings per year.

The night these laws were passed, Jack stayed over at Julie's house. They were next door neighbors and had been best friends since they could walk. The news sent a chill into both of them, and as they lay in their sleeping bags with the lights out, Jack asked, "Julie, do you ever think about dying?"

"Dude, fuck yes. I think about it a lot when I'm alone."

"Does it scare you?"

"It's pretty much the only thing to fear now, isn't it?"

"It's hard to imagine, everything just coming to an end."

"Forever. I know. Like, you never get to come back. You never get to do anything or think anything or remember anything. Ever." Julie trembled slightly just saying it out loud.

"How did people do it, back when they died after just seventy or eighty years?"

"They believed in an afterlife," Julie answered. "I guess they didn't worry about death, because they believed they'd still live on. Even after they died."

"That sounds stupid. I wonder if they really believed that."

Julie shrugged. "Yeah, I guess it does sound stupid, but if I knew I was gonna die, I'd wanna believe it too."

"I guess."

"I kinda hope that if I die, it's quick. Like super quick, like I don't even wanna know it's happening. You know? Like what could be worse than just sitting there, knowing that you're dying, and there's nothing you can do about it? It really fucks with your head."

"You don't think we'll get culled, do you?"

"Fuck, I hope not. Can you imagine?" Julie looked over at Jack and saw him looking at her with wide, fearful eyes, as if he was imagining that very thing.

"Will you apply for a culling card when you're old enough?" he asked her.

"I don't know, I mean killing someone? That's fucking intense."

"But you'd be protected. You'd be safe."

"Maybe my dad will get a culling card," she said, feeling hopeful at that thought.

"Maybe," Jack said thoughtfully. "I think I might apply."

That put an idea in Julie's head. "Jack?"

"Yeah?"

"If... Will you promise to marry me if you get a culling card?"

Jack appeared to consider it for a moment. "Then we'd be family, right? And you'd be protected."

Julie nodded.

"Okay, yeah, sure," Jack agreed. "But what if I don't get a culling card?"

Julie smiled. "You still wanna get married?"

"Maybe, I don't know."

"We'll see then." Julie began to feel better about the whole situation after that, and besides, she still had almost three years before anybody could cull her, and three years was a long time.

Julie's first experience with the new culling laws came a little over a year later, when she was just over fourteen years old and a freshman in high school. She and Jack had been outside their school, waiting for the first bell to ring and commence the start of their day. The band hall stood between the parking lot and the rest of the school, and they were hanging around that vicinity when Jack spotted the hit squad and pointed them out to Julie.

It was three people; they were clearly not high schoolers and they walked at a brisk pace, but they otherwise appeared to be ordinary people. Adults in plain clothes, who did not appear threatening in any way until they reached Alicia, a pretty junior in denim shorts who was leaning with her back against the wall, talking to a couple of boys. That’s when their purpose became clear, as all three made Glock 19 9mm's appear, and the one in the middle produced a badge that she held up in front of her.

"Alicia Belle?"

Alicia's dark brown eyes widened, as she seemed to notice for the first time the two women and one man who had come to kill her, and she answered cautiously, "Who wants to know?"

The woman in the middle continued as if Alicia’s response was unimportant. "As second cousin of Lou Bodella, you are hereby sentenced to death for his crime of culling interference. Have you any final words?"

The two boys who had been chatting her up mysteriously vanished, leaving Alicia alone and boxed in, an assassin to her left, an assassin to her right, one directly in front, and the band hall at her back. Alicia seemed flabbergasted. “I don’t even know who that is,” she managed, just before all three killers opened fire. Bullets struck her in the belly, bullets peppered her breasts, and bullets ripped through her upper arms and shoulders.

There were too many shots to count, but Alicia remained standing when the gunfire ceased, her thick and powerful legs shockingly resilient. Her killers nodded to each other, put away their weapons and walked off as briskly as they had arrived, leaving Alicia in tattered ruins, her back still against the wall, her pretty face speckled with blood, her brown eyes staring and shell shocked.

Alicia took a step forward, looking around for help, and Julie resisted an urge to run to her. The girl was clearly beyond help, and she was condemned. Attempting to save her might be seen as a criminal act, and Julie liked living, so she watched as Alicia took another step, her brunette pony tail bobbing cutely, her blood spilling from dozens of holes, and nobody moved.

“I flulphsss” Alicia said, blood spraying from her soft lips, her sweet brown eyes accusing every one of her spectators, and she finally fell to the ground. Julie expected that to be the end of it, but the spectacle continued for some time. Alicia tried to crawl for a bit, but she was mostly unsuccessful, then she flipped onto her back and let loose some truly harrowing sobs, lifting her head to look around every so often. She held on for an astonishing amount of time before finally lying still, her eyes hauntingly vacant.

When it was over Julie leaned over and vomited, as did a few others who had witnessed this massacre. It was alarming to think about how unexpected and how undeserved this poor girl's death had been. A man she had never met, Lou Bodella, Julie remembered, had apparently tried to interfere with state sanctioned murder, and because of that Alicia paid with her life. Before they left the yard and began what would be a very grim day at school, Julie used her phone to snap a couple photos of Alicia's corpse.

As soon as she got home she looked up all her relatives online, men and women she had also never met, some she had never heard of, and she emailed them. She sent them pictures of herself, and she sent them Alicia's picture, along with a brief synopsis of what had happened at school that morning. She pleaded with them to consider her promising young life should they ever be a witness to a culling, and to not do anything that could lead her to the same end as Alicia.

It took up most of her afternoon, and at night as she lie in her bed, Alicia was all she could think about. She kept returning to the photos she had snapped on her phone, and staring at them. Alicia's dead eyes. Beautiful brown eyes that had been so kind and sharp and alert were now just empty and lifeless. It was oddly captivating, and while it filled her belly with dread, there was something else there as well. As midnight neared and sleep didn't come she snuck out her bedroom window and crept next door.

After a few taps on Jack's window, she saw that he was having just as much success as she was at finding sleep. He lifted the window and Julie climbed inside.

"Can't sleep?" he asked her.

"Fuck no. I'm still creeped out. I emailed everybody in my family. I thought it would help me relax, but fuck. She didn't even know him, Jack. Can you believe it? Can you imagine?"

"I know, it's a mind fuck. That was smart though, Julie, emailing your family. I should have thought of that."

Julie grinned at him. "What are you trying to say, you're supposed to be the smart one?"

"No. I mean... it's a good idea. I'm going to..."

"Shut up, you idiot," Julie giggled. "I'm fucking with you."

"Yeah, well you're right. You're the smart one. I'm going to look up my family tomorrow and get in touch with anyone I don't know. Make sure they know whose lives they'll be fucking with if they interfere in a culling."

Julie nodded. "You know what's strange though? I keep looking at her photo. Her dead eyes. It's creepy, but... It makes me feel..." She was hesitant to say it out loud.

Jack looked at her intently, and she thought he could read her thoughts. Perhaps it was obvious what she wanted to say - she had been told she had a very expressive face. Either way, he finished her sentence for her, "like you want to fuck?"

Julie felt a slew of words die in her throat, and she nodded again.

"I've heard death can be a powerful aphrodisiac," Jack added.

"Does it make you horny too?" she asked him, her blue eyes wide and inquisitive.

"No," he answered, and she felt her heart drop for a second, but then he continued, "but you do."

Julie sprung forward and kissed him. It was their first kiss, the first time either of them had kissed anyone romantically, but there were no reservations in that kiss. Nothing held back. Julie felt so much passion flowing through her, she couldn't stop. She pushed Jack onto his bed, and as they sucked each other's faces, they began clawing at one another's clothes. Very soon they were naked, lying together, and Julie took Jack's throbbing penis and slid it inside of herself.

There was no worry of pregnancy. All teen girls who were well to do received a shot after their first period, which provided a genetic altercation that halted ovulation and greatly increased the blood supply, making teen pregnancy a poor person's problem, and as an added bonus it made death from traumatic injury much less likely. There were some who had regenerative abilities so great they were nigh impossible to kill, such as the hit squads that delivered the type of justice Alicia suffered, but such genetic enhancements were illegal for the general public. The best someone like Julie could hope for was genetic birth control and an extra quart or two of blood.

She groaned loudly as Jack pushed through her hymen, and she bled on him, surprised at the amount of pain she felt. After what couldn't have been much more than a few agonizing thrusts, each eliciting a soft, pained cry from her, it was over much too soon, Jack grunting as he climaxed, and Julie feeling sadly disappointed. Jack rolled over and sighed, an expression of euphoria on his face, and Julie lay on her side and studied him. She supposed it would be unkind to let on how unsatisfied she was, so she smiled and played with his hair.

"Holy shit, that was incredible," he told her.

"Thanks," Julie cooed.

"You didn't like it?"

"It was nice. I think it's just harder for girls to enjoy our first time, you know?" She hugged him, savoring the feel of his naked flesh against hers, and they lay in relative silence for a short time.

"Why do you think they don't just kill all the poor people?" Jack asked. "You know, instead of these culling laws. It's the poor people that are taking up too much space."

"The rich need the poor," Julie answered somberly. "Without them, they couldn't distract the middle class from the imbalance of wealth. The poor keep the middle class content."

"That's some bleak shit."

"It's life. It works, I guess, and it's better than no life at all. You're not thinking of starting a revolution, are you?" Julie winked and giggled.

"No. Fuck no. But I do think we better clean up a little," Jack said, motioning to the blood and semen sticking to their thighs and the sheets, and Julie agreed. Jack brought a couple of wet wash rags and a clean set of sheets, and they wiped themselves off and made the bed, both of them still in their birthday suits.

With another passionate kiss and a grope of Julie's firm, round ass, they parted, Julie slipping on her shorts and nighty and hopping out the window, and Jack returning to his freshly made bed.

Back in her own room Julie still struggled to sleep, so she held her phone in one hand, pulled up the photos of Alicia, stared into those dead, glassy eyes, and slipped her other hand between her legs. Very soon she had an orgasm of her own, and soon after that she dozed off.

In the coming weeks and months Julie made frequent late night callings through her neighbor's window, and the sex got better. The key to improvement was communication, and Jack and Julie were great at that. Jack told Julie what he liked, Julie told Jack what she liked, and they asked questions and answered honestly.

For example, after a frank discussion one night, Jack agreed to let Julie project an image of Alicia's corpse on the TV, and the sex was fantastic. Julie also discovered that she enjoyed being choked, and she had Jack rough her up a little sometimes, with slapping and spanking and twisting of her nipples, and she loved it when he pulled her hair. She needn't worry about him ever taking things too far; he was always kind and respectful of her, and they had a safe word - coffee.

Well over a year passed before Julie's next encounter with the culling laws. It was a Saturday, and Jack's sixteenth birthday. She had bought him the latest VR game that he'd been ranting and raving about for the previous six months. It had finally released only two weeks earlier, and she had dropped plenty of hints she was going to buy it for him so he wouldn't go out and buy it himself. It was a crime saga, and the protagonist was a detective - perfect fodder for civic-minded Jack.

Julie wore a green dress and a green ribbon in her hair, looking extra cute, and went next door at nine in the morning. Jack’s dad greeted her and let her in with a welcoming smile. The foyer branched off into a hallway leading to the bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, and Jack was in the latter, sitting on a stool at an island. "Julie," he exclaimed when he saw her, dropping his fork on a plate of unfinished eggs and sausage and rushing over to give her a hug. "What's this?" he asked, taking her gift and ripping at the wrapping paper.

"Happy birthday, motherfucker," Julie said coolly. Jack's reaction when he finished unwrapping his gift was as she expected - thrilled but not at all surprised.

"Thanks, Julie, you know I'm gonna love it."

"Yeah, don't mention it."

"So... I got some big news," Jack told her.

"I know, you're sixteen."

"No, dork, I mean this," Jack opened his wallet and pulled out a chip that produced a hologram declaring Jack a registered and official culler.

"Dude, no way. Shut the fuck up." Julie's jaw dropped. It was fantastic news. Her father had refused to apply for a culling card, saying it went against his principles, and her mother was so meek she couldn't hurt a mouse, so Julie had been very concerned about her life expectancy, especially since she would turn sixteen two months later. This was the answer.

"Yup, it's legit."

"That's incredible. How'd you do it?"

"I started the application process almost six months ago. I had to take a firearms test, an IQ test, a personality test, I had to see a few analysts and psychologists, but they said I passed them all. I'm a certified killer."

Julie laughed at that, “That doesn’t exactly inspire faith in our government,” but then she quickly sobered up and led Jack to his bedroom. "You know this means we'll have to be more careful. No more public displays of affection. I read that the girlfriend of a culler has a mortality rate of like almost fifty percent. If you kill someone and they want to get back at you, the only way they can do it is through me, since we're not family."

"Yeah, well, you turn sixteen in two months, and you remember our pact?"

"Yes!" Julie said, a little more excitedly than she had intended. "Oh God, I was hoping you hadn't forgot that. Yes, I remember, and yes, I'll marry you."

"Easy," Jack said laughing, "I haven't even proposed yet."

"Propose then, asshole," Julie cried.

"Alright, alright fine, let's get married."

"Can we do it on my sixteenth birthday?" By law they weren't allowed to get married until they were both sixteen, but Julie didn't want to wait one day longer than she had to. She wanted that security.

"Sure, you got it."

"But we can't tell anyone. It has to be a secret. I don't want to be killed walking down the aisle or some shit, you know?"

"You're kind of bossy, you know that? We're not even married yet and you're bossing me around." Jack smiled.

"Fuck you," Julie hit him in the shoulder and laughed.

"Just tell me one thing, Julie," and she could tell by the look on his face he was serious now. "Do you love me?"

There was only the slightest hesitation, as Julie wondered if she did love him. They were best friends, they got along famously, she enjoyed no one else's company more than his, he was great in the sack, but did she love him? In the end she decided the distinction was unimportant. She cared very deeply for him, she liked him about as much as anyone could like another person, and if the marriage grew stale there was always the option of divorce - it was an expensive and arduous process to prevent sham marriages, but it was an option, and she would remain safe, as even ex-wives and ex-husbands were protected under the culling laws. "I do," she answered.

Jack's expression brightened, and his reply was warm and kindly, "I love you too."

They spent the day goofing off and taking turns on Jack's new VR game, which he was thoroughly pleased with, and in the evening Julie let Jack tittie fuck her and cum on her face. Her breasts were high and perky, and not the gently sloping melons that were more conducive to such activities, but Jack still seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards, as they lay in bed, Julie asked him, "Have you started on your list?"

"What list?"

"Your culling list, silly. You have to kill five people this year, surely you've thought about it if you applied six months ago."

"I mean I've thought about it, but I don't have a list."

"Don't you think you need one? I mean you're not gonna just randomly kill five people. Who's gonna be your first?"

"Any suggestions?" Jack looked to be at a loss.

"Holy shit, Jack, you're the culler, not me." But she did have a suggestion. She had been thinking about it all day, she just wasn't sure if she wanted to say it out loud. If she told Jack who to kill, and Jack killed that person, wouldn't that make Julie just as culpable? Could she handle that on her conscience? She wasn’t a killer, which was why she hadn’t applied for a culling card of her own.

She finally decided that five people had to die, whether she said something or not, so she might as well have her input. "Okay, how about Sarah?" A chill went down her spine as she said it, but she reminded herself that if she said nothing her inaction would just as surely condemn someone else, so did it really matter?

Julie thought Sarah was a sweet girl, truthfully, and Julie had told a small lie. Sarah wasn't obsessed with Jack, she was in love with him. Sarah might even be able to make Jack happier than Julie could, and if Jack realized that and hooked up with her, well then Julie wouldn't only lose out on being the wife of a culler, Sarah might then be having the same conversation with Jack about Julie that Julie was having about Sarah right now.

"I mean she's sixteen. If she gets a culling card, I think she'll try to kill me. Or get someone else to do it. Even if we get married on my birthday, there's still a window of opportunity there." And there it was, Julie's greatest fear put to voice. "I don't wanna die, Jack, and you gotta start somewhere, right?"

"Maybe. Let me think about it."

"Sure, it's up to you of course, but if you don't have someone else in mind already."

As it turned out, Jack didn't need to think about it too long. The following Monday as the two teens walked to school, he showed Julie his .44 magnum revolver and said, "Third period. Today."

“So you decided?”

“Yeah, fuck it. Sarah’s as good a mark as anyone. It’s like you said, I have to start somewhere. I just need to pop my cherry and stick my dick in there.”

“You’re gonna stick your dick in her?” Julie gave Jack the side eye and scrunched up her nose.

Julie looked around nervously, then shushed Jack. “Dude, keep that shit on the DL.”

“Relax, nobody heard me.”

“I hope not,” Julie was less concerned with people knowing about her fascination with the dead than she was with people knowing she and Jack were fucking. Sarah was a cute and popular girl, and Jack would surely make enemies by killing her, which would put a target on Julie’s back. Especially if word got out she and Jack were romantically involved. “So, you’re gonna do it during class?”

It felt like an eternity before third period arrived, and a weird knot of excitement was building in Julie’s stomach. Someone was going to die, and she was going to watch. When it happened to Alicia it was nauseating, but Julie hadn’t been expecting it then, so she hoped this time would be different, and the anticipation was killing her.

She spotted Sarah in the hallways before class, laughing with her friends and completely carefree, and felt a pang of guilt. The girl really didn’t deserve to die, but then again none of them did. It was just something that had to happen.

As they began third period history and took their seats, Julie’s eyes were glued to Sarah. She and Jack sat near the back of the classroom, so Sarah was ahead and to their left, and for fifteen minutes Mr. Hammond lectured and Julie heard none of it. She kept watching Sarah, a pretty young girl in the prime of her life who was completely oblivious to her coming doom. She tried to imagine what Sarah was thinking about, and how those thoughts would change when the first bullet struck her.

When she finally tore her eyes away long enough to look at Jack, she saw the torment the poor guy was going through. She couldn't read him the way he could read her, but his pain couldn't be more obvious, and she didn't envy him. A culling card sounded like a great idea on the surface, but now that he had one, he had to use it. There was no turning back.

She looked into his sea green eyes, and was taken aback by how handsome he was becoming. In her mind he was often still little Jacky, chasing her through the backyard with a water hose and a bucket of balloons, but he was almost a man, and he was about to make the most difficult decision of his life.

All Julie could do was offer her friend some small token of comfort, so she reached across the aisle and let him take her hand, and she gave him a look that said it would be okay, that she would support him no matter what, but he was going to have to kill someone sooner or later and it wasn't going to get any easier than it was now. The fact that she could convey all this without uttering a word was a testament to their lifelong friendship, and the message was received. Jack smiled sadly, and she knew he was going to do it.

He released her hand, removed the .44 from his backpack and his culling card from his wallet, and he stood up. "This is a culling!" he announced, holding up the hologram produced by his card, and he began walking deliberately towards Sarah. There were shrieks and shouts, but Julie tuned them out. She had her phone out and she was recording, her attention focused entirely on Sarah.

Sarah had turned around, and when she saw Jack approaching she got out of her chair and backed away, her hands held out in a pathetic attempt at defense. "Jack?"

"I'm sorry, Sarah," Jack told her, raising the gun.

"Jack, wait!"

Jack didn't wait. He fired his pistol, and the first shot made contact with Sarah just beneath her sternum. The magnum was deafening in the enclosed classroom, and nobody heard Sarah grunt as the bullet penetrated her. She had been seated in the row farthest to the left, and Julie saw her blood and guts spatter against the wall behind her. Although the shot was dead center, it apparently did not sever the girl's spine, because she remained on her feet.

"Jack," Sarah said, blood spattering from her lips, just before Jack shot her again. This time she was struck in the center of her right breast - a large and rounded melon that was much better suited to tittie fucking than Julie's perky little tits. Jack quickly shot her again, leaving little time for a reaction. The third shot struck the inside curve of her right breast, near her breastbone, and Julie felt certain that took out the girl's heart. It was fitting, she supposed, that Jack broke Sarah's heart both literally and figuratively.

It was the last shot Jack fired, and they all watched as Sarah slid down the wall until her butt touched the floor. The class was silent; the only sounds were the ringing in their ears from the gunshots and Sarah quietly gurgling on her blood. Sarah held herself upright with her arms pressed against the wall, but Julie could tell she wouldn't be long for this world. Unlike Alicia, whose killers had seemingly intentionally left her heart in tact, Sarah's ticker was wrecked, but before her eyes lost focus she looked up at Jack and told him, "I love you."

When Sarah was still and her blue-gray eyes vacant, Julie stopped recording and leaned over to puke.

That night the sex was the best it had ever been. Julie had considered playing the video while they fucked, but discretion won out and she decided not to. Both she and Jack were on edge, and Jack seemed in need of a little escapism. She sucked his dick and let him tittie fuck her, and afterwards she rode him as he choked her and beat her, and in her mind's eye she kept seeing Sarah's sweet young face and dying gray eyes, and she heard her final words over and over. I love you

She let Jack choke her longer and harder than usual, until she began to see spots, and when at last she came her orgasm exploded with a rage that was almost unnerving. She thrashed and screamed loud enough that Jack's parents were sure to hear, but she didn't care. Her man had killed for her, and although the death of Sarah ended up being even more traumatizing than Alicia's, it was also strangely romantic.

Afterwards, as they lay in bed exhausted, Jack asked, "Julie, do you think she really loved me?"

Julie looked at him and saw the heaviness weighing on his heart, and in an effort to put him at ease she repeated her earlier lie, "She was obsessed with you. It's different."

Julie's third and final encounter with the culling laws came on her sixteenth birthday. It was a day she had long dreaded, but now it came with a certain sense of promise. It was her wedding day after all, and once married she'd no longer have anything to fear. Her family members had all replied to her emails, assuring her they would never endanger her life by interfering in a culling, and with the introduction of the culling laws there were no longer any other crimes that called for the elimination of an entire bloodline.

Her spirits were high, and life was as good as it had ever been. She had parents who loved her, a kind and caring best friend who doubled as an adept sexual partner and soon to be husband, she was in excellent physical and mental health, she was young and witty and beautiful, and aside from the off chance that she'd be culled in the next eleven hours, there was no reason to think any of that would change.

She picked out blue skirt that highlighted her eyes and a plain white tee that teased the flesh around her navel, and slipped on a pair of clean white tennis shoes. It was an ordinary outfit, to disguise the fact that she had a wedding to attend. There wouldn't be a big ceremony or bridesmaids or groomsmen or any other family or friends there. She and Jack were just going straight to the courthouse after school to finalize the paperwork. They could have a ceremony another time, if they felt the need.

She applied a layer of clear lip gloss to her perfect lips, but she wore no makeup because she really didn't need it. She met Jack on the sidewalk and they began their morning commute to school.

"Happy birthday, beautiful," Jack said sweetly.

Julie beamed at him. "Thanks! So what'd you get me?"

"You'll see later," he answered coyly. "You know, I'm not sure you thought this through. Having our wedding the same day as your birthday, you're going to be missing out on gifts."

"Bullshit, you still gotta buy me a birthday gift and an anniversary gift, there's not gonna be any two-for-ones going on, motherfucker."

"You think so, huh? We'll see, bitch."

Julie laughed and slung her arm around Jack. "I love you," she told him, and for the first time, she thought she really meant it.

"I love you too."

During lunch they snuck off to the janitor's closet, stripped off their clothes and had quick and wild sex. She bounced topless on his dick, her modest breasts jiggling beautifully, and Jack smacked her in the ass, punched her in the stomach, and wrapped a cord around her neck and pulled. For the briefest of moments she realized he could legally kill her and it added that extra element of danger, but then she remembered cullings must be carried out in public.

She came before he did, and when she was done she got on her knees and sucked him off. She let him spatter her face with his semen, since it was what he liked to do, and she even slurped a bit of it off his dick, despite the fact she thought it tasted disgusting. The whole thing took less than ten minutes, and they both had time to eat their lunch before heading to fifth period trigonometry, a class they shared.

As Miss Moore began her lecture, Julie sat giddily, unable to stop smiling at Jack. Only three periods remained before school was out, and then they would be married, which meant she was less than four hours from securing her future.

Twenty minutes into class when Miss Moore called on her to solve for sine, she floated up to the board, ready to conquer any challenge thrown at her. She had almost completed the equation when she heard the boom from behind her, and her blood sprayed the dry erase board, covering part of her work.

Confused, she began wiping her blood away so she could finish the problem when another boom sounded, and more of her blood splashed onto the math problem. Someone doesn't want me to finish this equation, she thought, and she looked down at the pair of exit wounds in her belly. She sighed and turned around to face the class, then simply remarked "Oh."

Jack had his magnum out, and a tendril of smoke billowed from the barrel. In his other hand he held up his culling card. As Julie looked at him he shot her again, and she felt a terrible pressure in her abdomen as a third bullet tore through her guts.

Miss Moore sat speechless, almost as stunned at this turn of events as Julie, and Julie started towards the door at the back of the class. After only a couple of shuffling steps Jack shot her a fourth time, again targeting her midsection. Julie stumbled as bits of flesh and guts flew out her back, and she caught a desk as she fell. She and the desk toppled, and the boy who had occupied it, she thought his name was Doug, stood up a split second earlier and stepped back.

“Sorry,” Julie told him with a nervous laugh, and she picked herself up and continued towards the back of the class. Her path took her straight to Jack’s desk, and she stopped to tell him, "Coffee," then she giggled at him and mussed his hair. Jack responded by pressing the barrel of his gun against the bare flesh of her belly and squeezing the trigger. Julie grunted softly and sighed, “Oh, Jack,” before moving on.

It was beginning to sink in, everything crashing down around her, by the time she reached the door. She would not be getting married, she would not live beyond her sixteenth birthday, she wouldn’t even see the end of the school day. There was no escaping it, nowhere to go, but Julie at least wanted to feel the sun on her face one more time. As she reached for the door handle Jack shot her again.

The exit wound opened in her upper abdomen this time, and Julie tasted blood in the back of her throat. She glanced over her shoulder and scowled, rolled her eyes, and fumbled the door open. When she stepped into the hallway she saw that the gunshots had attracted a small crowd, and a murmur went through them.

“Julie!” a boy, she thought he was a freshman, started towards her.

Julie was clutching her belly with both hands, but she held up a bloody palm to halt the kid. “It’s okay,” she told him. Nothing about this was okay, but she didn't want anybody else losing their lives on her account. “I’m being culled. I just need to go get some air before I die.” Blood was beginning to spill over her lower lip and dribble down her chin now.

“Oh,” the boy answered. “That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does,” Julie agreed, thinking that was a massive understatement.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Yeah, I’m scared.” Another massive understatement.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re the hottest chick I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks,” and with that Julie concluded this bizarre conversation and continued on her way. Luckily Miss Moore’s classroom was just outside the administration's office, which was only twenty feet from the main entrance. Julie crossed that threshold without much difficulty and stepped outside.

It was nice to feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, and she wondered how many times she had taken that feeling for granted. As she started down the main steps she began to feel light-headed, and she sat down. So this is where I die.

As Jack watched Julie practically skip to the board to work on a math problem, he knew this was it. He had to do it now. He hated it, but this was the responsibility he had taken on. Sarah hadn’t deserved to be culled, but Julie most certainly did.

He watched her firm round buttocks move beneath her skirt, and it was almost painful. She was beyond any doubt the most beautiful girl he’d ever know, and she was fucking him. She might go on fucking him for another ten years, or maybe twenty, but she’d eventually tire of it and move on to find some other man to use and manipulate, and then she’d ruin that man's life too, and on and on it would go.

It wasn’t even her fault really, she was easy to love, but she couldn’t love anybody other than herself. Jack loved her, but he couldn’t marry her, and if he was being honest as a culler, he knew he had to kill her. Julie had been the one to suggest he make a list, and soon after that she had ended up not only on that list, but at the top of it.

With a heavy heart he took out his culling card and his .44 magnum, and he took aim. Julie was working diligently, oblivious to the danger behind her, and Jack targeted center mass as they taught him in firearms training. The sites hovered over Julie’s lower back, where her loose white tee was lifted just enough to show off her creamy skin, with a tiny bit of baby fat bulging over the hem of her skirt. The magnum exploded and spit lead.

Julie squawked and inexplicably began to wipe her blood off the board, and Jack shot her again. When she turned around he saw the pair of exit wounds, one on each side of her navel, about three inches apart from each other. Her shirt hadn’t fully settled after she had raised her arms to write on the board, so a couple inches of her midriff were bare, and both wounds were plainly visible.

“Oh,” Julie remarked nonchalantly, but her stunning blue eyes and the expression on her mesmerizing face belied her unconcerned tone. Jack could see she was terrified. He promptly shot her a third time, and the bullet left a hole slightly up and towards Julie’s center in relation to the exit wound left of her navel. “Miss Moore, I think I need to be excused to Nurse Carr’s office. My tummy hurts.”

It was an adorably cute thing to say, and it might have been funny if the situation wasn’t so grim. Blood was streaming from her gut and she was clutching uselessly at herself, trying to stem the flow. Her blue skirt was turning maroon, and Jack saw trickles running down Julie’s bare shins and dripping onto her clean white shoes. She started walking and Jack let her take a couple steps before plugging her again.

The bullet tore into the right side of her belly, a little to the right of the exit wound on that side, and Julie lost her footing. She tried to avoid falling by grabbing onto Doug’s desk, but Doug stood up and backed away, letting both Julie and his desk go crashing to the floor. Julie laughed goofily and actually apologized, then she picked herself up and staggered over to Jack.

He kept his expression cold and distant, not wanting her to talk him out of what he had already begun, but she just said, "Coffee," and then giggled cutely and tussled his hair a little. He nestled the barrel of his pistol under the bottom of her shirt, which was still a couple inches above her cute little coin slot belly button, and angled it just enough so the shot wouldn’t hit her spine before pulling the trigger.

Julie grunted prettily, then sighed and simply said, “Oh, Jack.” He watched her with a certain admiration as she walked away - it was clear that she had not seen any of this coming, but she was maintaining her composure far better than could be reasonably expected - and again he found himself staring at her marvelous buttocks as her glutes did their work, every contour easily visible against the soft fabric of her now blood-soaked skirt.

She reached the door and nobody else had so much as gotten out of their seat, including Jack. He gave her one final parting shot, expending all the shells in his revolver, and Julie cast him a dirty look before leaving the classroom. Once she was gone, all eyes turned to Jack, and he just shrugged and said, "Well shit, she's one tough bitch." He chuckled, and there was some nervous laughter from the class. "Miss Moore, you can continue, I'm sure there's enough witnesses out there. I just need to follow her and make sure she dies."

Jack slipped on his backpack and headed for the door. When he reached the hallway, Julie was already pushing through the main entrance and stepping outside. There was a small crowd stagnating outside Miss Moore's classroom, and Jack asked, "Do any of you want to witness Julie's final moments?"

"Why are you wasting her?" a kid asked him. "She's so hot."

"I thought you two were friends," another girl said. Jack recognized her as Teri.

"I'll go," the first kid said, "It's the last chance time I'm ever gonna get to see her."

A couple more guys elbowed each other and one of them said, "Yeah, we'll go too."

And so the three boys followed Jack outside, where Julie sat bleeding to death. "Julie?" Jack said as he approached.

Julie looked up at him and smirked, "Culled on my sixteenth birthday. I wonder how often that happens."

"And by your best friend," Jack said as he sat down next to her.

"By my fiancé," Julie corrected him. "You know if you didn't want to marry me, all you had to do was say so."

"I did want to marry you, at least at one point," Jack admitted. "But you never loved me. It wouldn't have worked."

"Is that why you did this?"

"You're a taker, Julie. You used me to kill Sarah because you didn't want to lose me, but you didn't really want me. You just wanted my protection."

Julie smiled, punched him in the shoulder and rolled her gorgeous eyes. "You dummy. I do love you. Or at least I did, before you blew my guts all over Miss Moore's class."

Jack was taken aback. He could tell when Julie was lying, and she wasn't lying now. "The first time I asked if you loved me, you said yes, but I knew it was bullshit. I pretended it wasn’t, but I knew. I had hoped you would love me when I killed Sarah, but you didn't. When did that change?"

"I dunno, today maybe?" Jack remembered Julie telling him that she loved him that morning, and it had seemed somehow different, but he had chalked it up to wedding day giddiness. "You know, if you keep killing every girl that falls in love with you, you're gonna be pretty lonely. Just some free advice."

"That's part of it too. You lied about Sarah. She did love me, and she wasn't a threat to you."

"You got me there," Julie conceded. "It was a rotten thing to do." She chuckled sadly. "It's ironic, isn't it? I suggested you kill Sarah and marry me because I didn't want to be culled, but it's exactly those things that got me culled."

"Life's a trip sometimes."

"Yeah, I wish my trip lasted a little longer though." He looked into those charming blue eyes of hers, saw her blinking back tears and chewing her bloody lower lip, and a flood of memories fluttered through his mind. Julie chasing him around her backyard, playing tag. Julie jumping off the roof of their house and landing in a pile of pillows and blankets they had built on the ground. Julie spending hours at a time playing Blood Dragons with him, his favorite two-player video game. Julie's smile. Julie's laugh.

He gently brushed a lock of soft, chocolate-brown hair away from her face and caressed her cheek. "I'm going to miss you, Julie."

"You bet your ass you are," she told him. "So... I was wondering... why'd you shoot me in the belly?"

Jack shrugged. "Center mass."

"Center mass my ass. Sarah gets three bullets in the chest but I get gut shot six times?"

"I was closer when I fired on Sarah."

"Dude, I was standing next to you, saying coffee, and you put the fucking gun against my tummy and fired."

"Yeah, well, you already had four bullet holes in your gut by then, I figured I should be consistent."

"I think I turned you into a sadist," she said with a sly smile. "All that time in the sack, you liked treating me rough."

"I don't know, I never really thought about it. Maybe." He suddenly realized he had a raging boner, so perhaps Julie was right. Had he been following his civic duty, or was he subconsciously just following his cock?

"Yeah, you like watching me suffer, you fucking dog. You remember when I said that if I had to die, I hoped it would be quick?"

"Oh shit, you did say that!" Jack had completely forgotten about that conversation.

"Yup. I said dying slow would be like the worst thing imaginable. And here you are, killing me slowly."

"Is it as bad as you thought?"

"It's worse. So much worse."

Jack began fumbling in his backpack for his box of shells. "You want me to finish it?"

"What I never considered was - if you go to the doctor and the doctor says you have six months left to live, what do you do? Do you just kill yourself and be done with it?"

Jack thought about it. "I guess it might depend on how much pain I'm in."

"Yeah, well, not me, and I'm in a fuck ton of pain, let me tell you. For me, I would just try to enjoy every second I could, because the only thing worse than dying a slow and painful death... is nothing. And that's what death is. It's nothing."

“That’s an interesting point of view.”

Julie smiled and swiped some blood from her mouth, “So how long do you think I have?”

“I’m not sure.” Jack looked at the puddle of blood around Julie, the trail of blood leading back to the school, the stream of blood running down the steps in front of them, the blood on Julie’s clothes and dribbling down her chin. “Ten minutes maybe?”

“I think Alicia only lasted a few minutes, and she wasn’t shot with a .44 mag. This thing’s a fucking hand cannon.”

Julie spat blood and stuck out her lower lip in a pout. “Way to kill the mood. So if I’ve only got ten minutes left, what are we gonna do with that time? You got any cool games in that bag of yours?”

“Nothing fun, school issued stuff. Educational stuff,” he said.

“Figures. Well. I guess we could look at the sky. I never paid attention to how beautiful it is. So many beautiful things in the world, you know? We don’t even notice them until it’s too late.”

Jack thought it was a poignant observation, but looking at Julie he realized it was never more true than when it came to the girl herself. How many times had he looked at her and thought she was hot, or cute, or sexy, without fully recognizing her beauty? “Nothing’s more beautiful than you.”

Julie smiled at him, and he felt his heart breaking. “Oh, Jacky, why’d you have to kill me?”

Jack didn't have an answer for that. It had seemed to make sense not so long ago, but now it felt all wrong. Why had he killed his best friend, a girl he loved and who had actually loved him in return? This was so fucking bad. Instead of responding to that impossible question Jack simply stared at Julie, who was looking wistfully up at the sky, and he basked in her hypnotic beauty.

After a minute or two Julie winced, clutched tightly at her stomach, and an alarming amount of blood gushed from her mouth. She looked at Jack, two big tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, her lower lip quivering, and she told him, “I don’t think I’m gonna make it to that half hour mark.”

“You asshole, I also said I didn’t wanna be shot to death, but that didn’t stop you, did it?” Jack frowned. “Come on, Jack, don’t be a wiener, I don’t wanna laugh, I just wanna smile. Make me forget I’m dying for just a second, yeah?”

“I’m sorry, Julie, I can’t think of any good jokes.”

“Tell me a shitty joke then.”

Jack thought for a moment, then said, “Okay, fine, in memoriam of your sexy belly, how about this: where do you go to learn to belly dance?”

“I dunno, where?” Julie asked.

“The navel academy.” Julie actually did smile at that, and Jack continued, with a bit more confidence now. “What did the policewoman say to her belly button?”

“I hope you don’t get pierced today?” Julie guessed, glancing at her own bullet-riddled belly for extra effect.

“Good guess, but nope. You’re under a vest.”

Julie snorted. "Fuck, that's bad."

"You think that's bad, your momma's so fat, she has an echo in her belly button."

Julie crowed with laughter, albeit briefly, before covering her mouth to stop an onslaught of blood. After a moue of pain her smile returned, "Okay, enough jokes. I think I just ruptured something. Tell me a story." Blood was coursing steadily from her lips now, and her chin was completely coated.

"Well, when I was four years old, I was outside in my front yard playing with my Global Commando action figures when this chubby little girl saw me from across the street and came over to ask me what I was doing. I told her I was fighting off these rebel terrorists, and she sat down next to me and joined in."

"But not back then. Back then you thought I was tubby. But I guess you didn't care, because we did spend that entire afternoon playing together."

“Yeah, we took out those terrorist bastards, and then you chased me around pretending to shoot me.”

Julie smiled sadly. “Well the tables have turned now. If I’d known how that relationship would turn out..." Julie coughed and gurgled, then whimpered meekly before continuing, "I’d have stayed the fuck on my side of the street.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Jack told her, thinking it was romantic, and immediately realizing it was insensitive. He wasn’t the one dying.

“Fuck you,” Julie said wheezily. “You’re such a dick.” Her voice was cracking.

“I’m sorry, Julie, I didn’t mean...”

“Fuck off with that shit.” Blood was spurting from her lips like a fountain. “I’m fucking dying, Jack. I’m fucking dying. You being sorry doesn't help. Oh fuck, I’m so fucking scared.”

“You know, it was only about a hundred years ago when our ancestors believed there was a God, and that after you died you got to live forever in paradise. Some people still believe it.”

“Oh, I wish I could believe that shit. I really do.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

Julie gave Jack a look that said, Come on, Jack, you’ve known me my whole life, you know I’m not falling for that.

"I guess you're right," Jack conceded. "We know it's not."

"Jack," Julie said with a sense of desperation, her blue eyes suddenly wide. "Jack... Jack, I don't... this is it!" Those were her final words, and with that she laid back on the stairs, her perfect mouth yawning in terror, and he watched the life go out of her spectacularly beautiful eyes.

"Can we see her tits?" one of the boys who was witnessing asked. When Jack looked at him in anger he appealed, "What, she's not going to care."

Nice, I'm glad at least a few people liked it. I flip flopped a few times on the ending. Originally I planned for another boy who Julie had rejected or who just obsessed over her to kill her, I briefly considered the idea of a jealous female culler, and then I decided Jack should be the one to do it. My worry was that it would be too similar to Julie's Anatomy Lesson, and I'm trying not to be too repetitive, but I just really like the idea of Julie's best friend and lover betraying and killing her.

Bloodlust, I've got an idea. In your stories Julie is usually an atheist. What if you make her a firm believer an kill in such way that dying she thinks of how god has failed her, allowed her to be killed, did nothing to stop or even to punish the killers? Make her despair over her broken faith and wasted time and the prospect of not going to heaven.

I appreciate the input, but Julie doesn't normally start out as an out and out atheist except when her story is set in a dystopian future. She usually starts out as a Christian, or at least someone who wants to believe, or believes she believes, but then she has a crisis of faith along the way and by the time she dies she's basically an atheist. I've thought of a more extreme version of that crisis of faith scenario, which might be similar to what you're suggesting, but in the end she still dies an atheist.

I like to explore her faith, or lack thereof, because it's important to me that the victim doesn't believe in an afterlife. If death isn't final, it sucks all the drama out of it and ruins the fantasy, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure how to write someone that really, truly believes in God, but then blames God for her own death and doesn't believe she's going to heaven. I am an atheist and I try to be respectful to those who are religious, but it seems to me that if someone truly believes Heaven is the ultimate paradise, death is the best thing that could happen to them.

That said, it might be possible to work that angle into the story I'm writing now, but we'll see how it goes.

I have had an idea for a story for a while now, but im just awful ad getting motivated to write. And when I do, im never satisfied with it. Putting ideas into words just seem to not really work with me.So if you're looking for input and inspiration for a future story im happy for you to take from my idea. It would be interesting to see your take on it.

But the basic premise is based off these Mexican/Brazilian cartel executions. My main character (in this case however, Julie) and some of her friends would get caught up into a bit of trouble while on a girls holiday or a business trip. Something like getting asked to smuggle some drugs in for a high price in which they stupidly agree, only for them to loose it or have it taken off them maybe?

Then after a long and pretty brutal game of cat and mouse (one of the friends here would die. A short video then being sent to Julie and the remaining friend of her torture/death), the cartel would catch them finally and then execute them slowly brutally, so they can use the footage as a "message" for anyone that tries to fuck with them. No sudden headshots or instant beheadings, but instead stuff limb removing, eye gouging, slow disembowling, stabbing and slashing, debreasting ect. All to really get that shock factor for the recording before leaving them to finally die.

I think with Julie's seemingly unbreakable mentality, it would make for quite the plot. Her going through and taking everything they throw at her. Outlasting her other friend, and surprising the cartel members with her resilience, while they try to figure out more brutal ways to break her body, but more importantly her mind.

I tend to look at those low quality executions that get posted online every so often, and it got me thinking about this. As much as im not really into real gore, I do use it to get whatever creative juices I have flowing.

I like it! It’s an intriguing idea that I can hopefully work on soon. Right now I’m writing something that should be quite a bit shorter than the culling story, and I want to get through it before starting anything new. I also want to fill Julie with arrow shafts, and I’ve got a couple stories where I started down that road, but they’ve sort of sputtered and stalled.

Yes on the Arrow shafts, I always get excited when I see an update here. Your probably one if my favorite authors :3 personally I'd live to see some fucking and stabbing like internet dating gone wrong, fuck her while you gut her I love that stuff.

Hey, thanks for bringing the thread back from the dead, Malesor! I didn't have a link saved and I thought I might have to post everything all over again. If the site stays up, I'll probably keep posting stuff as I write it. If it goes down for good, I might end up posting on DS again.

So this next story I don't think is one of my better ones, but it ticks several boxes that people here had asked for. Hanneko wanted to see Julie die a firm believer, lamenting over her wasted faith, and this story does that. TastyMonk wanted to see some gutting while fucking, and this story does that too. Before the massive spam attack a girl had asked for stories involving a lesbian serial killer/serial rapist, and this has that as well.

When Carla saw her, she knew immediately she was the one. Everything about her was perfect. Her full figure with curves in all the right places, her pubescent skin glowing with a supernatural vibrancy, her sparkling smile, her thriving vivacity, her body language expressing an air of both innocence and sexuality, the warring factions somehow brought to peace within her exquisite features, her soft and rich brown hair caressing her bare shoulders, her strong jaw and full cheeks, and the real kicker, what really took your breath away, her piercing blue eyes.

The more Carla watched the girl, the more enchanted she became. When she pointed the vixen out to Luis, he was equally captivated. How could he not be? He had eyes, after all. They were completely in agreement that she would be the one, so Carla stalked her. She watched the girl laughing and joking with her friends as they sipped their drinks, watched her deftly send would be suitors away with a giggle and a few kind words, watched her flirt and dance, her sleek black dress hugging tightly to her supple teenage body, and when the girl was alone at her table, her two friends on the dance floor, Carla made her move.

She strolled casually by, glanced in the girl's direction as if by chance, and then, as if this was all on a whim, suddenly said, "Oh, hey, I'm Rose," and extended her hand.

The girl took it and gripped it with her own soft and tiny fingers, and replied, "I'm Julie," flashing that beaming smile.

"So that guy you were dancing with, is he with you?"

"Oh no, we just met. He just asked me to dance."

"You planning on going home with him?"

Julie giggled. "No, I'm with my friends." She pointed to the dance floor.

"Ah, you're from the U.S., aren't you?" Carla had known Julie was a high school kid who crossed the border to take advantage of Mexico's legal drinking age as soon as she saw her, but she played coy.

Julie nodded.

"Alright, well I just didn't want to step on anyone's toes, you know? I was thinking of asking your dance partner if he'd be interested in a one night stand."

Julie made a flippant gesture to indicate she was fine with it. "Be my guest. You want me to introduce you?"

"Oh would you? You're a doll!"

"Of course, no problem. Come on." Julie stood up and led Carla across the club, ducking and weaving through the crowd with a simple, almost clumsy grace, and Carla wondered if the roofies were already beginning to kick in. "David," Julie called as they arrived at another table.

Carla noted the four local boys and another high school girl from the States seated there, and she recognized the boy with whom Julie had danced among them. The boy stood up, truly a strapping lad, with broad shoulders and an aw-shucks smile, and she could see he was trying to be cool as he reciprocated Julie’s greeting. “Hey, Julie!”

“I want you to meet my friend, Rose.”

David smiled good-naturedly at Carla and embraced her warmly. “Hey, Rose, nice to meet you.”

He was cute and all, but really not Carla’s type, so she had to feign interest. “Hey, David, so how do you know Julie?”

“Oh, we just met tonight, actually. Why don’t you join us?” David looked at both Carla and Julie as he extended his invitation, but his eyes lingered a bit longer on Julie. Carla could hardly blame him. Julie was even more exquisite up close, which in Carla’s experience was a rare treat. The old adage about sitting too close to the stage almost always rang true, but Julie seemed to defy even the laws of nature with her beauty.

Carla eagerly accepted, taking a seat on David’s side of the table and ogling him with false hunger in her hazel eyes.

Julie flashed that adorable smile, her innocence shining through, and politely declined. “I’ve gotta get back to our table and keep an eye on my friends’ drinks, but we’ll catch up later.” Carla smirked at the irony of keeping an eye on drinks that were already drugged.

“So, you’re a friend of Julie’s?” David said, returning to his seat.

“Yep, I told her I wanted to talk to you so I could ask if you wanted to fuck me, but I’ve seen the way you look at her. I know when I’m beat.”

“But wait, if she introduced you to me so you could, you know, try to fuck me, doesn’t that mean she’s not interested?”

“She’s into you, she just wants you to take charge. Be assertive. She wants a guy who knows what he wants and is willing to fight for it.”

“You sure? What about all that shit about respecting boundaries?”

“Yeah, I mean that’s important with some chicks, but not Julie. She’s a traditional gal. Just go over there and tell her I tried to steal you away, but you’re only into her. Tell her she’s the only thing you care about, and you’re going to make her yours. You’re going to take her home with you, no matter what it takes.”

“You really think that’ll work?”

“Trust me, I know Julie. I know it will work. Just don't tell her I put you up to it. It'll ruin the magic.”

Once David had set off on his fool's errand, Carla went to work on his buddies. One of them seemed preoccupied with chatting up the high school girl at the table, but the other two were restless. They nursed their drinks, eyes skirting the club for potential mates. Their attention turned to her as she scooted towards them.

"You're looking for some company?" the one closest to her said. He was tragically short and his nose was broad and flat, and she guessed he sought to make up for it by being the brashest of the group. That would work in her favor.

"Sorry, champ, you're not my type, but I got some good news." She pointed to Julie's two friends, who were dancing with each other at the moment. "Those two are looking to get laid tonight, and they’re not as selective as I am. They said they’ll go home with whoever buys them the most drinks and is still hanging around at the end of the night."

“No bullshit?” the short one asked.

Carla shook her head.

“Come on, Jerry, let’s give it a shot.” He led Jerry off to the bar, and Carla leaned back and smiled. It was too easy. She’d give things a few minutes to develop, and then go rescue Julie from David.

Jerry and the short kid were apparently not completely incompetent, because very soon they were dancing with Julie's friends and sharing drinks. Julie, meanwhile, appeared to be every bit as uncomfortable as Carla anticipated, and David showed no sign of relenting. It was time to take action.

She meandered back over to Julie's table, where David was laying it on thick. "I don't think you realize how beautiful you are, baby. I'm never gonna be able to forget you. You're in my head forever now. You have to give me a chance here. I swear you won't regret it."

"Like he's crushing hard," Julie continued, and Carla could detect a slight slurring in her speech. "I was just telling him it won't work, and he should just shack up with you. Maybe you can help me out?"

Carla shrugged. "I mean, I can't say I didn't tell him the same thing, but the kid knows what he wants. What can I do?"

"Tell her, Rose. Tell her I need her, and she just needs to roll with it."

"Honey, I think it's time to read the room," Carla said in her most soothing voice.

"But you said..." David protested.

"I know what I said, but take a break. Go get us some drinks."

"Rum and coke," Julie said, knocking back what was left in her cup.

"Gin and tonic for me," Carla said, and David, although exasperated, obeyed.

"I think I'm getting fucked up," Julie admitted, once David was out of earshot, "and that dude's starting to creep me out."

"I see what you mean. I'm a little glad he rejected me now."

"Right? You're lucky. Motherfucker can't take a hint. Do me a favor. Looks like my friends like..." The slurred speech was becoming more pronounced. "My friends are dancing, or I'd ask them, but make sure this asshole doesn't take advantage of me." Carla found herself swimming in the girl's eyes - she was just incredible. It didn't seem real.

"You got it. Sisters before misters."

Julie giggled at that, and held out her pinky. "Pinky swear?"

"Pinky swear," Carla agreed, and she interlocked her own pinky with the girl's tiny finger. It wasn't difficult after that to convince Julie that David had drugged her, and Julie's friends were soon too out of it to notice or care when Carla helped Julie out the front door of the club and into a black 2002 Ford Taurus.

When Julie clawed her way back to consciousness, the first thing she noticed was the shackles around her wrists and ankles keeping her hogtied. She tested their fortitude and found she had at least enough wiggle room to move her hands to her hips and rise up on her knees. That's when she realized she was naked.

She saw she was on a bed in a windowless room, and judging by the lack of furniture and the staircase on the far end, she guessed it was a basement. There were two people looking at her, a man and a woman, both of whom were oddly familiar.

"Good morning, sunshine," the woman told her, and she knew that voice. Everything was groggy, but...

"Rose?" Julie asked. Rose was chunkier than this woman, and had long black hair, and green eyes, but somehow...

"No dear, Carla. Rose is simply the identity I adopted last night. I'm impressed you could recognize me without the body suit, wig and contacts."

"And he's the bartender." Julie nodded to the man.

"Luis," Carla added. "He's the one that slipped you and your friends the mickey. That poor boy David was just our fall guy, I'm afraid."

"What did you give me? I still feel weird." The truth was, despite being tied up and naked in some stranger's basement in a foreign country (was she still in Mexico?), she felt good. Damn good.

"Last night, Rohypnol. About an hour ago we dosed you with MDMA."

"What are you gonna do to me? Rape me?"

"We're going to have sex with you. Whether or not you consent is up to you. But if I may make a suggestion - fight us and you'll be miserable, but relax and let the narcotics in your system do what they were designed to do, and you might just end up having the time of your life."

Julie pondered it for a moment. She knew it would be a sin to willingly participate in lesbian sex, and sex out of wedlock, and a threesome couldn’t be godly, but what was the use in fighting it? Besides, she had the rest of her life to repent. "So you're going to have sex with me whether I want to or not. That sounds a lot like rape, but I guess I'll play along. Can I at least be untied?"

"Sorry, dear, your restraints are necessary."

"Fuck. Alright. Well, how do we get this shit started?"

"Ooh, look at you, raring to go." Carla ran and jumped onto the bed with Julie, and immediately began feeling her up. Her hands started with Julie's face, caressing her cheeks, then moved down her shoulders and over her breasts until they reached her belly. They lingered there, and the woman purred. "Mmmm, so soft and warm, mmmm, I just love tummies." Carla worked a finger into Julie's navel and prodded gently around.

"I'm seventeen," Julie said tentatively. "Not sure if it matters, but full disclosure." She didn't think it mattered.

Carla only giggled, then moved her fingers down to Julie's slit. She did something magical down there, causing Julie to have a sharp intake of breath. "You like that?" Carla asked.

Julie nodded. She liked that very much. Carla continued her magic trick on Julie's snatch while moving one hand up to massage the girl's tits. She kneaded the buoyant, pliant flesh that composed Julie's modest bosom, giving the nips a twist now and again, and Julie lost herself in ecstasy. She barely even noticed when Luis stripped down and climbed on the bed behind her.

Her gaze was held by Carla, whose eyes had been green last night but now were brown. The woman was staring intently at her and wearing a creepy smile, but she was so good with her hands, and as Julie felt an orgasm building in her loins one of those skilled hands moved away to grab something. "Don't stop," Julie moaned. "Oh God, please."

A double headed dildo appeared from underneath the pillows, and Carla eased one end into her own wet cunt, then guided the other end into Julie as she carefully slid beneath the teen girl. Julie's gasp was one of both pleasure and pain as her hymen burst, and blood trickled down onto Carla.

"Oh, a virgin. Mmmm. You're really something, Julie."

"I'm... ah... ah... sorry," Julie grunted in between moans as they found their rhythm together.

"Don't be," Carla said through clinched teeth. "I like virgins."

Julie responded with a series of girlish cries that suddenly became squawks when Luis' throbbing pecker was crammed up her ass. It was painful at first, then mildly unpleasant, but soon after she found it only added to her pleasure. For several minutes they fucked like this, the two adults creating a teenage sandwich, and Julie was panting in immeasurable delectation. She never dreamed anything could feel so good.

She was in the midst of what was either her third or fourth orgasm when she felt an acute discomfort in her belly pushing its way through all the pleasure. When she glanced down, she was appalled and amazed to see the glint of a steel blade protruding nearly six inches from her midriff. She had been stabbed! Luis had run her clean through.

Carla continue to be impressed by how perfect Julie was. In the nude the girl was even more beautiful. Her breasts were just on the small side of average, but they were wonderfully perky and went well with her body shape. Her hips were curvy and her ass was plump and round and her stomach was the best part of all. It was a delectably smooth, soft, slightly pudgy wall of flesh, but there was no bulge to it - her tummy was completely flat. Her navel was a vertical slit squeezed in the middle of a spectacular sea of moon-colored flesh.

And she was a virgin. That little revelation had done wonders for Carla’s libido. Julie's voice, so cute and high-pitched and girlish, her virginity, and her sweet, adorable visage all painted a picture of innocence that was countered only by her bright, daring eyes and her subtly sexy body language.

Watching the girl ride the dildo, working herself into a frenzy, her incredible teenage body glistening with sweat, was the greatest thing Carla had ever seen. That is until Luis' bowie knife emerged from the poor girl's belly. The face Julie made was priceless. Her blue eyes widened in shock, her lips curled into something akin to a sneer, and her sexy moans became deeper and more throaty.

The blade disappeared and left a wide vertical slit about an inch to the left of Julie's belly button, and a spurt of blood jettisoned from Julie's tummy and splashed onto Carla. Luis wasted no time in shoving the knife through Julie again, and this time it punched through an inch and a half to the right of the girl's navel, again running parallel to her natural slit.

"Wait, stop," Julie croaked. The blade disappeared as it was withdrawn from her flesh again, and they continued to fuck. Julie's blood ran down to her crotch and mixed with her cunt juices, making for a different kind of lubricant. The girl tried to reach her belly so she could cover her wounds, but her hands stopped short around her hips. "Stop. I need... I need help."

Carla scrunched up so she could lick the girl's tummy, dipping her tongue into the crack of her navel, then she laid back and fumbled under the pillow until she found her hunting knife.

Julie's eyes fixated on Carla's weapon and she managed a meek protest, "No, wait, please," just before Carla plunged the blade into her soft flesh. She began thrusting in and out, matching the rhythm of the knife to the rhythm of her hips pumping against Julie's crotch. Her flurries were all focused in the center of the girl's abdomen, in between the two gaping wounds Luis had left.

Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. In and out. In and out. She savored the gentle resistance the knife met each time it moved forward into Julie's guts, the soft grunts the cute teen made each time her belly was pierced, and the quiet squishing sound of the blade parting tender teenage flesh over and over. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Some of the wounds began to overlap, and pink tubes began to press through the gaps in Julie's beautiful skin.

Carla paused, then planted the knife in the left side of Julie's abdomen. This was Luis' cue to run the girl through again, and his bowie knife poked through high in Julie's stomach, only an inch and a half below her ribs. Her perfect lips formed a wry smirk as her eyebrows furrowed, and a spray of blood spewed between her gritted teeth. Luis pried the front of his blade downward through Julie's tummy, and Carla pulled her blade sideways, slicing the girl open.

"Awk," Julie squealed helplessly, as more and more of her digestive tract spilled out of her belly. A massive tangle of glistening pink tubes drooped from the eight inch vertical slit Carla's knife made, tracing from the left side of her gut to just beneath her navel. So much more gore and blood along with a bulging mess of her large intestine made an exodus from the gaping wound Luis had just left in her.

"Oh fuck, my guts! I can see my guts!" Julie's cute, girlish voice had grown even more shrill and incredibly small, and her terror gave Carla a massive surge of pleasure. In a frenzy, she savaged the poor teen’s belly six more times with her knife. Julie wordlessly articulated her devastation with a sound that wasn’t quite human, and when she regained enough of her wits to speak, she blabbed, “Fucking fuck. Fuck my guts. Oh fuck, those are my intestines.”

Carla hadn’t even noticed when Luis had removed Julie’s restraints, but the girl’s tiny hands were free and clutched uselessly at her spilled entrails. Meanwhile, Luis had stood up, his formidable pecker standing at attention, and he set aside his Bowie knife and helped himself to a loop of Julie’s small intestines, wrapping them around his throbbing penis. “Fuck your guts? Don’t mind if I do.”

It was the first time since they had awoken Julie that he spoke, and Carla bleated with laughter. Julie seemed less amused.

“You fucked me up. You really fucking butchered me. I can’t believe it.” Julie’s strength was gone, and with Luis no longer behind her she slumped backwards until her shoulders touched the bed. Her feet were still pinned beneath her buttocks, so this stretched her stomach taught, pulling some of the gashes in her belly open even wider. Blood was spilling from her mouth as she spoke, and she lifted her head just enough to look at the mess they had made of her midsection.

Both hands splayed across her breadbasket, trying to cover as many wounds as possible and perhaps stave off death a little longer, she offered one final plea to her captors. “Please, help me. I don’t wanna die. Please take me to a hospital.”

Luis grinned demonically and looked at her with wide, psychotic eyes as he stroked his cock with her bowels, but he did not reply. Carla only laughed and bit her lower lip as she continued to fuck her dildo and watch Julie intently. Julie understood then that they were sadists, and her begging was getting them off. It’s what they wanted. She was going to die on that bed, and no one was going to help her.

The MDMA made the emotional impact of this realization all the more powerful, and there are no words to express the turmoil and devastation Julie felt. Her God had tested her, and she had failed. All the years she spent praying and going to church and practicing abstinence and trying to do the right thing, and in the end God had put her in an impossible situation just to see if she could overcome the drugs and the peril of her own life to fight off sexual deviance.

Of course she had failed, because it wasn’t a fair test. It was an act of a cruel and uncaring God, and the reward of eternal life would not be hers. She would not even live to see the tender age of eighteen.

Julie wrestled with these thoughts as Luis finally climaxed, and he pointed his one-eyed willie at Julie’s stunning face, spurting his seed onto her cheeks and her mouth and her eyes. It was the ultimate insult, and all Julie could do was blink at the salty semen and try not to cry.

It occurred to her that these two had done this before to other girls, and they would continue to do it many more times without suffering any consequences. Who knew how many innocents would lose their lives and their chance at Heaven because of these two? God wouldn't stop them, clearly, but perhaps Julie might. There was a Bowie knife within her reach, and she was no longer restrained.

Summoning all her remaining strength and all her will power, Julie suddenly shoved herself off the bed, and in the process she managed to snag the Bowie knife that had spilled her colon. She ended up on the floor, fighting off severe disorientation, and she somehow rose to her feet. Her vision was spotty and her head was spinning, and she had no idea how she was standing, but she could see that her actions had caught Carla and Luis off guard.

She tried to lunge forward but her legs were wooden and her balance was shaky, and she slipped on her own ropy guts and went mostly sideways. Carla was still on the bed, still pounding her snatch with that double-headed dildo, her eyes wide and intrigued, but not fearful. Meanwhile Luis' initial surprise had subsided and he pulled up his pants and found a Ruger LCP .380 in his back pocket.

Julie tried again to close the distance between her and this hateful bastard, hoping to bury that huge knife in his black heart, but before she could, Luis raised the pistol and put three holes in her right breast. The gunshots were frighteningly loud in the confines of the basement, and the impact stole her breath from her.

Her right lung was in tatters, and her forward motion stalled before it had even rightfully begun. Instead of charging ahead as she had intended, Julie took a wavering half step, then slumped back and sat down on the bed again. She peered at her wounded tit and saw two neat holes in her areola, one of which had consumed a small portion of her nipple, and the third hole a little farther towards the inner curve of her breast.

“Of course,” she sighed, blood beginning to flow more freely from her mouth, and now also trickling from both her nostrils. She looked up at Luis and told him, “Fuck my life.” He smiled at her as she let the Bowie knife slip from her fingers and rattle on the floor, and he put the Ruger back in his pocket.

All she had earned herself was a quicker death, and although she was suffering greatly, she wanted to cling to every second of her life. When it was over she either had Hell to look forward to, or possibly just an eternity of nothingness, but she was not eager to experience either of those things.

She lay back on the bed and just tried to breathe - a task that used to be so simple and automatic but now required a great deal of labor. This is it, she thought. This is where I die. She still managed to spend nearly ten harrowing minutes lying on her back and thinking about her death before her life finally ended.

Thank you, Malesor. I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I’ve had a couple suggestions in this thread that I like, including the failed drug mule scenario where Julie’s apprehended by a cartel, and the idea of rats eating Julie’s belly, but I really want to finish a story where Julie gets arrowed to death.

To the anonymous poster asking for a hanging, it’s possible I suppose. I’m not nearly as big a fan of asphyxiation as I am of shootings and stabbings, hence the screen name, but I do enjoy a good hanging now and again. I have one fantasy that’s been floating around in my fucked up head for quite a while that ends with Julie being hanged, but there’s so much shit up there that I never get around to writing, so we’ll see.

>>14653You could satisfy both the blood lust and the hanging with a scene like the death of Judas. See what you can do with hanging (Matthew 27) and disembowelment (Acts 1:18). You may as well review the source material of my faith before you dismiss it, right? It's easier than you might think to be a Christian guro fan. Just read some Old Testament. (Oddly, though, crucifixion doesn't turn me on.)

I was actually raised to be a Christian, and spent countless hours in church; it just never made sense to me. I didn't just dismiss it off hand, I had to go against everything I was taught from a very early age. Anyway, I don't want to turn this thread into a religious debate, and I'm not trying to bash Christianity with my stories. It's really not my intent. Like 95% of the people I love most in this world are Christians.

My one fantasy that does involve hanging also involves disembowelment, so we're on the same page there.

You're writing one with arrows? That'd probably be fun to read, you've used them before in a different scenario, and I did like it then. The one you currently have in your head, is it all arrows? Or are more methods involved? In any case, any story from you sounds great.

>>14675Your stories don't feel like Christian-bashing at all. Except of course when there is literal bashing involved. What good is faith if it is never questioned? I love the stories, on many levels, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

“I went with my brother and a few of his friends like three months ago. It’s pretty tight. I was the only reason we escaped.” Julie flashed a big shit-eating grin.

“So what, you’re the escape room queen now?” Kari asked.

“Fucking goddam right I am.”

“How do you know they didn’t just let you think you were solving everything? Maybe they all had a crush on you and wanted you to think you were the hero.”

“My brother had a crush on me?”

“Maybe not him, but the rest of them? Boys are pigs.”

“Dude, I’m smarter than that. Don’t be a hater, slut.”

“Yeah, well I guess we’ll see.”

“We’ll see? Does that mean we’re going?”

“Fuck it. I can’t have you gloating about your escape room skills forever. Lauding that shit over me. I’ve gotta show you how it’s done.”

“Yes!” Julie cackled and clapped her hands. “Game on, bitch!” Hanging a right, she exclaimed, “I think it’s like five minutes from here.”

"We can't do the same puzzle you already solved though."

"No shit, dumbass. This is actually a new place. Tommy tried it a couple weeks ago with Tony and Kevin, but they failed. That’s because he didn’t invite his little sister." Julie winked and stuck out her tongue.

"You're so full of it," Kari said, laughing.

"I can't wait to solve this shit in record time and go home to rub it in his face. I need you to be kicking ass though. We gotta work as a team."

"Yeah, but the dick sucker didn't tell me what it costs. He just told me how much dick he sucked. The other place I went to was twenty bucks a person, so it'll probably be like that."

Kari frowned. "It better be worth it."

"Bitch, don't get cheap on me. It'll be worth it."

Kari rustled through her purse and pulled out a wallet, then peeked inside. "What if I'm short?"

"How short?"

Kari smiled. "Twenty dollars?"

"You lying cunt!"

"Okay, but I might be short a couple bucks."

"I got you, sister bitch."

"Cool."

"This is it!" Julie said, pulling into a small, eight-car parking lot. They were in a crowded commercial district, with the occasional fancy home crammed between office buildings. There were no signs or obvious markings to indicate this was the place, but Julie knew it was across the street from a gynecologist's office - the aptly named Dr. Kooter. Her disgusting brother had been keen on pointing that out.

There was a sidewalk that led to a stairway behind the office building they had parked beside, and through double-swinging doors was a clerk behind a desk and a waiting area with a few plush chairs. The clerk was a mousy man in his mid thirties with spectacles, short black hair, and his nose buried in a book, and he didn't even bother to look up when the girls made their entrance.

"Is this the escape room?" Julie asked cautiously, and the clerk cast his squirrely eyes upon her.

"Yes ma'am, is it just the two of you?"

"Yes sir, it's just us."

"It's twenty-five dollars each, please."

Kari gave Julie a bashful look and handed her a ten, a five, and two ones. "You still got me?"

Julie stuffed the bills in her pocket and answered, "Of course." She pulled a fifty from her own wallet and handed it to the clerk.

After holding the fifty up to the light and inspecting it, he stowed it in the register and pressed a button. "Have a seat. Our host, Mike, will be right with you."

"Must be nice to have cash to blow," Kari muttered as they sat down.

"You're such a fucking hater," Julie retorted. "Besides, we're not blowing it. This is gonna be fun."

Mike arrived very quickly from behind a door and introduced himself with a practiced grace. Rules were laid out about where and how to look for clues without damaging the property, and he collected their cell phones so they wouldn’t be able to cheat. He gave them the familiar spiel about working together and communicating to get through the challenges they were about to face, and then he led them beyond the door from which he had appeared and down a corridor.

There were rooms on either side of the hallway, but they passed them, turned a corner, and at last came to the room they would be occupying. Mike let the girls enter first, and Julie was about to ask why the room was so empty when the door shut behind them. She heard the rattling of locks and grabbed the door handle, but it didn't turn. They were trapped.

"Is this not how it works?" Kari asked, curious about Julie's sudden apprehension.

"No, this is not how it's supposed to fucking work. They're supposed to give us a scenario. There's supposed to be stuff in here." Julie waved a hand at the white, windowless walls and bare marble floor. "How can we find clues and solve puzzles in a room that's completely fucking empty?" She hammered a fist against the door.

“Dude, calm down, you’re freaking me out a little.”

“You should be freaked out a fucking lot. This is wrong.”

“Wait, quiet.” Kari had her head tilted slightly and her smoldering hazel brown eyes staring intently at nothing, the way a person looks when she's listening for a faint sound.

After a second or two of silence Julie heard it. “What is it?”

“Sounds like a snake?”

“There’s no way there’s…” Julie trailed off as she glanced up towards the ceiling. A cloud of light gray was seeping through an air duct, and as soon as she spotted it she began to smell it. “We’re being gassed.”

“What?!”

"We're being fucking gassed." Julie pointed out the ominous cloud, and the girls exchanged looks of horror before Julie asked, "You think they’re gonna use us for human trafficking?”

“You mean get us hooked on drugs and make us hookers?”

Julie nodded.

Kari smiled sardonically. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, I was thinking they were gonna torture and kill us."

Julie gulped and her blue eyes widened. "Okay, you're right. Whoring doesn't sound that bad. What kind of gas do you think it is?”

Kari shrugged. “I figure if I go for something so ridiculously awful it can’t be true, then we’ll end up being pleasantly surprised.”

“Yeah, right. Nothing about this is pleasant.”

“I don’t know about that. I think I’m starting to get high.”

“Me too.”

“Could be they just wanted to hotbox us. Get us stoned before we solve their puzzle.”

Julie laughed, “Bitch, this ain’t fucking Cheech and Chong. Besides, that doesn’t smell like weed. It smells like burnt rubber.”

“I think it smells like one of your farts.” Kari wrinkled her cute little button nose.

Julie laughed again. “Goddammit, Kari, we’re being abducted and poisoned. We’re probably gonna end up on Dateline or some shit. How the fuck can you make jokes?”

“You gotta keep your sense of humor in a time of crisis.”

“I guess you’re right. This could be the last time we get to laugh.”

"You don't really think we're gonna die, do you?"

"I thought we were gonna be drugged up whores, remember? You're the one that went with the torture and death scenario."

"I wonder if they'll rape us first," Kari smiled playfully.

"Maybe they'll just rape us and let us go?" Julie never thought she'd be so hopeful to be raped.

"Maybe. Maybe they'll get a horse to fuck us while they disembowel us."

"Jesus Christ, Kari. How the fuck do you come up with this stuff?"

Kari shrugged and yawned. “Are you getting sleepy?”

The room had taken on a foggy quality, and Kari shimmered behind waves of mist. “Yeah, I think it’s the gas. They’re putting us to sleep.”

“What if we never wake up?” Kari asked, her big eyes suddenly wide and fearful.

"I guess that would be better than getting raped by a horse with my guts hanging out."

“I don’t wanna die, Julie.”

“Yeah, me neither. How about we just take a quick nap instead?”

Kari offered a half-hearted grin, “Okay, just a quick nap.” Her eyelids felt like they were filled with lead, and before she knew it she was asleep.

Julie was the first to wake and soak in their new surroundings. They were still in the same room, at least as far as she could tell, but the room was no longer empty. There was a file cabinet in the far left corner, there was a desk with some notes, some books, and a computer on it pushed up against the right wall, and in the center of the room there was a girl with her guts on the wrong side of her body.

The girl was strapped to a steel table tilted at a seventy degree angle, so she was almost completely upright. Her wrists and ankles were held by leather restraints, and there was an outcrop on the low end of the table that served as a foot rest, keeping her from sliding down or putting undue strain on her arms. It was unclear if she was alive, although Julie thought she saw the girl’s chest moving ever so slightly with the admission and expulsion of breath.

Quite a lot of blood was spattered on the girl’s clothes and pooled on the tiled floor below, and still more was dripping and trickling down. The girl, despite her disembowelment and massive blood loss, was beautiful, with a round face and big pouty lips, dirty blonde hair and fair skin. She had a full figure with generous curves, clothed in a white cotton half shirt adorned with a dead yellow emoji and a black sarong draped skirt, and her feet were bare.

After only a few seconds, Julie realized her own attire was oddly similar, as was Kari’s, the only difference being the emoji on their shirts. Julie’s was a smiley face, and Kari’s was frowning. The clothes Kari and Julie had been wearing when they entered the establishment were mysteriously gone.

“Kari,” Julie called to her friend, who was just beginning to stir. “Kari, wake the fuck up. There’s a dead chick in here.”

Sara was interrupted by a voice booming from a speaker somewhere in the ceiling. “Welcome to the first ever life or death escape room. Your game begins now. You will have sixty minutes to figure out how to escape, and if you should succeed, you will be free to go. This facility has been rented by a phantom, made up entirely of forged documents, so nothing will be traced back to us. Good luck.”

“Holy shit, are they serious?” Kari asked, her voice shrill.

“They gutted Sara here, so I think they’re pretty serious.”

“You think we could be dead in an hour?”

“We could be dead in sixty seconds, but I’m not planning on dying here, so wudduya say we figure this shit out?”

“Alright. Okay. We got this, right?”

“Fucking goddam right we do. I’m the escape room queen, remember?”

"Sure. Of course. So what do we do? How does this work?"

Julie tried the door handle, confirming it was locked. There was a keyhole on their side of the door, so the goal was to find the key that fit it.

"You go look at the stuff on that desk. See if that computer turns on. Be Batman. I'm gonna ask Sara some questions." Kari nodded and rushed over the desk, and Julie approached Sara. The dying blonde looked as if she was slipping in and out of consciousness, so Julie hoped she could get some answers. She lightly caressed the girl's face and gave her cheek the gentlest slap she could manage, "Sara, are you still with me?"

Dark, hazel eyes looked up at Julie, and in them she saw the terrible torment this girl was enduring. "Help," Sara pleaded.

"Hang in there, sweetie, we're gonna get you outta here. We need your help first, though. I need to ask you some questions."

Sara nodded and whispered weakly, "Okay."

“How long have you been here?”

Sara glanced at something over Julie’s shoulder, and Julie followed her gaze to the clock above the door. It was a classic clock with a minute hand, hour hand, and second hand, and Roman numerals to mark the time, and it currently announced it was 3:47. Julie made a mental note that they needed to escape by a quarter til five. “A couple hours.”

“Did you come in to try the escape room too?” Sara looked confused and her eyes lost focus for a moment. “Sara, stay with me, baby.”

“I was taken… Two guys. Never seen them before… They grabbed me outside my apartment. Said it was for some kind of game.”

“And they’re the ones that did this to you?”

Sara nodded.

“Did you see them setting things up in here?”

“No. This was all… already here. They just brought ya… you two… in like ha… half an hour ago.”

Julie realized this was not the same room where they were gassed after all. “Is there anything else you can remember that might help us get out?”

Sara’s chin quivered and she shook her head, “No,” but Julie thought she detected a hint of dishonesty in the blonde girl’s eyes.

“Julie, take a look at this.” Kari had managed to turn on the PC and she had several pieces of paper strewn across the desk.

“What do you got?” Julie asked, walking over with piqued interest.

“There’s a few diagrams of, well, guts and stuff,” Kari pointed to some fold outs that looked like they were taken from a health magazine, some showing images of internal organs and one a complete map of the female digestive system. “The PC needs a password to be unlocked, but there’s this note that probably has some clues.”

Julie picked up the note and read it.

[i][b]Sara has proven to be uncooperative. All we could get out of her was some cryptic message about us knowing the hour of our demise. She knows more than she has let on, that much is certain. We have other methods at our disposal to get her to spill her guts.[/b][/i]

“What else do you think she knows?” Kari asked in a whispering voice.

“It’s a prop,” Julie said, “Just some bullshit story they made up to set the stage for their escape room.”

“So what do we do next?”

“Check out those books. Flip through them, see if anything’s hidden inside. I’m gonna try the file cabinets.” Kari did as Julie instructed, and Julie soon found each drawer to be locked tight. She pushed the cabinets away from the wall and peeked behind them, but saw nothing of import. “You see anything?”

Kari shook her head. “Not unless they expect us to study up on interrogation techniques and the human anatomy.”

Julie mulled it over. “The hour of our demise. They wouldn’t have put that in there if it didn’t mean anything.” She looked up at the clock. It kept time well enough. The second hand ticked away the seconds and they had less than fifty-five minutes to escape this death trap if the voice over the intercom was to be believed. She hurried over to the doorway and stretched her fingers as high as she could, but the clock was just out of her reach. “Come over here and get on my shoulders.”

Julie was a stout and sturdy girl with an athletic body that was taller and meatier than Kari’s, so she was easily able to hoist her slight of build companion onto her back, and Kari snatched the clock from the wall. “There’s a key taped to the back!” Kari cried excitedly.

“Score! Now be careful when you put the clock back. We need to know how much time we have left, so don’t fuck with it.”

“Yup. Got it.” Kari hung the clock back on the wall, hopped nimbly off Julie’s shoulders and held up the key.

“It’s gotta open one of those cabinets,” Julie told her. The girls scurried across the room, eager to test the key in each lock, which as it turned out wasn’t necessary. It opened the first one they tried, and inside they found a hunting knife, a box of surgical gloves, and a small spiral notebook.

The book was titled [u]Sara's Journal[/u], and on the first page they found the following scrawled:

[i][b]They found me! How am I going to get out of this? Everything’s at stake now. People are counting on me. All that we've worked for could come crumbling down around us. Six of them outside my door, ready to burst through any second. Someone must have sold us out. Who could be the mole, I wonder? Oscar? Roberto? Doesn't matter. I've got no time left, and one more key to hide. Swallow it.[/b][/i]

Julie and Kari read it together, then looked at each other and looked at the knife. "No," Kari said, horrified.

"It fits. It makes sense. The diagrams of the digestive system, the books about anatomy."

"We can't."

"We have to." Julie picked up the knife and a pair of gloves, ever mindful of the clock, and walked around to face Sara. "Sweetie, I'm sorry."

"You found out, didn't you?" Sara was trembling.

"Found out what?"

"They… made me swallow a key."

Julie nodded. "It's our only way out. Either we find the key inside you, or we all die.” She pulled the rubber gloves over her hands and took hold of Sara’s bowels. “I’ll try to be gentle.” Several coils of intestines dangled between the blonde girl’s knees, totaling nearly eight feet in length, and Julie began to smooth them out, squeezing as tenderly as possible up and down the piping, feeling for something hard and metal inside.

Her efforts didn’t pan out, so she began to tug, and more slippery guts snaked their way through the gash in Sara’s tummy. The poor blonde whined and whimpered, but to her credit, she didn’t scream. Time slipped away, and Julie still found nothing. Her fingers became less benign as four o’ clock came and went, and she gave the glistening pink snakes a yank.

Sara yelped as nearly all of her small intestines and a sizable portion of her large intestine came unraveled and spilled messily out of her belly. Julie paid little mind and went right to work feeling for that damned key. Squirts of excrement spattered the table when Julie squeezed the lower portion of Sara’s colon, and still she found nothing.

The search became exponentially more frenzied, and Julie took the knife to Sara’s midriff and sliced open her upper abdomen. Digging through muscles and fat, Julie found the girl’s stomach and pulled it free. She tore it apart like a paper bag, Sara’s brown eyes opened wide in astonishment, and at last the key rattled on the floor.

“I found it!” Julie squealed, peeling the gloves off her hands and plucking up the key in excitement.

Sara gurgled on a mouthful of blood, and Kari watched it all unfold as if in a trance. “You killed her,” Kari finally said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of incredulity.

“No. The people that put her here did that. I’m trying to save the people that are still alive.” Julie stuck the key in the second file cabinet’s lock, and it turned easily enough. Within the drawer she found a loose piece of paper and a lockbox with a combination lock. The paper had the tell-tale torn loops along the left edge of a note ripped from a spiral notebook. On it the following was penned in the same handwriting as contained in the previously discovered journal:

[b][i]Combination is stored on PC. Open Microsoft Word. Search for Lockbox Combo. Take what’s inside the box. 1 of you escapes. loss is part of life. it cannot be prevented. fret not. everyone dies in the end.[/i][/b]

“Well that’s not very encouraging,” Kari noted, her large brown eyes wide and her arching eyebrows raised cutely.

Julie’s own brilliant blues narrowed and her brow furrowed. “I don’t give a fuck what that says. We’re both escaping, and we’re both winning. Losing is not gonna be part of our lives today.”

“Looks like we need to figure out the password for the computer.”

“Yup. Any ideas?”

“There must be something more to this note. So far we haven’t really learned anything from it.”

“Yeah, like why is it written like some lame ass haiku?”

“Well, it’s definitely not a haiku.”

“Whatever, bitch. This isn’t English class. You know what I mean.”

“I do?”

“Like there’s a pattern or something somewhere. It’s just too weird.”

“I get it, yeah. Wasn’t the other note like that too? The one in the journal?”

"No shit, I think you're right!" Julie pulled out the journal from the top drawer and compared the notes. "Wudduya see?"

"You're never supposed to start a sentence with a number. You know, like a digit. One should be spelled out here."

"Okay, what does that tell us? Somebody sucks at grammar?"

"Maybe, but more likely there's a reason for it. Like they did it on purpose. Look here. They didn't capitalize the first word of the last four sentences either."

"Why would they…" Julie trailed off, deep in thought for a few seconds. She was onto something, surely. Her shockingly beautiful and expressive face slowly lit up like a Christmas tree, and she nearly screeched with delight. "Kari, you fucking genius! That's it. It [i]is[/i] intentional. It's part of the password. Look at the first letter of each sentence!"

Julie left the journal and the paper in Kari's hands, not sticking around for Kari to have her 'oh shit' moment. Instead she rushed over to the PC, the clock ever present in her mind, and typed COST1life into the password field and hit enter.

The desktop appeared, and she found Microsoft Word and opened the document saved as ‘Lockbox Combo’.

[b][i]9-3-4-7-1

Each of you holds a key. One leads to life, the other leads to death. Choose wisely.[/i][/b]

Julie felt her skirt for pockets, knowing there were none. There was nowhere else she could hold a key. Kari was watching her, and Julie was reluctant to share the disturbing message, but Kari could see the obvious concern on her friend’s gorgeous and expressive face. “What’s wrong? What’s it say?”

Julie hesitated still, “It says… each of us holds a key. One leads to life and one leads to death.”

A horrible realization dawned on Kari. “Holds a key? Where?” They both knew, but neither of them wanted to say.

Julie looked to Sara, and while she appeared more sickly than ever, the blonde’s eyes were half open and she somehow still clung to life. “Did they make us swallow keys as well? Did you see them do that?”

"Maybe," Julie agreed. Taking a deep breath, she spun the numbers on the combination lock to match the computer screen. There was an audible click and she lifted the lid. Inside was a scalpel and another note. Her heart sank at the sight of the scalpel, but she picked up the note and read it aloud.

[i][b]Two girls are trapped in a room with only two exits. One exit is guarded by a fire-breathing dragon with a taste for human flesh. The other leads to a room composed of glass prisms that reflect sunlight in such a way that anyone who enters is immediately burned alive. How do they escape?[/b][/i]

Kari, who didn’t know about the scalpel, appeared thoughtful, welcoming the riddle. “Let me think. Give me a minute.”

Julie decided not to tell her friend about the surgical tool in the lockbox. It already had Julie shaken up enough - there was no sense in distracting Kari from solving their latest puzzle. So while all Julie could think about was what it would feel like to have her belly slit open and her insides fondled, Kari considered their riddle.

After a couple of minutes in silence, Kari posed a guess. “What if they opened the door to the dragon, got him to breathe fire through the room they’re in and melt the glass in the other room?”

“Her.”

“What?”

“Her,” Julie repeated. “The dragon’s a her. Why assume it’s a he?”

“Jesus, Julie. This is hardly the time for a lesson in feminism. Yeah, male shouldn’t be the default sex. I get it. So?”

“So I like the way you’re thinking, but it’s too complicated. Too many things could go wrong, and it doesn’t help us figure out how to get out of here. There’s gotta be a simpler answer.”

Kari thought a bit longer, then posited another solution. “Okay, what about this? One of the girls sacrifices herself in the glass room, cooking herself alive. The other girl then feeds her buddy to the dragon, giving her time to escape.”

“Better. It almost fits. But who’s the sacrifice? How do we know the dragon isn’t intelligent enough to kill the escaping girl and save the one that’s already dead for dessert? The answer to these things is usually more obvious. Like once you get it, there’s no doubt it’s the right answer.”

“Well, I’m still waiting for your guess.”

“I know, I know. Fuck! I can’t fucking think! I need to focus. Okay, let me read it again.” Julie read the note silently this time, carefully contemplating each word. When she got to [i]sunlight[/i], a lightbulb went off. “I got it!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, they escaped at night. Wait until night, then go through the glass room.”

“Of course!“ Kari cried. “[i]You’re[/i] the goddam genius.”

“I dunno about that.” Julie offered her best ‘aw shucks’ smile. “I’m not totally sure how that riddle helps us.”

Kari looked at the clock. It was 3:27. “How much time do we have?”

“Like twenty minutes, maybe a little less.”

“Well we can’t wait until night time, that’s for sure.” Kari chewed her plump lower lip.

“Kari…” Julie thought it might be time to tell her friend about the scalpel. It was there because one of them needed to be cut open, and perhaps the riddle was meant to tell them which one.

“Wait!” Kari interrupted. “There’s a light switch.”

Julie held her breath, allowing herself to hope. Maybe the next clue would change everything. Maybe they were being led to incorrect assumptions, only to find the key was not so difficult to acquire after all. Kari hit the switch and the room darkened, the only remaining light emanating from a black light fixed in the center of the ceiling.

Kari went to try the door, but Julie was frozen, her heart sinking. “No. No no no no no No!”

Kari took her hand off the handle after confirming it was still locked and looked at Julie. “Okay, Shia LaBeouf. What’s wrong?”

Julie pointed to the glowing letters on the west wall.

[b][i]Don’t be sad, girl. Happiness inside you is the key.[/i][/b]

“It’s me,” Julie lamented, pointing at the yellow smiley emoji on her half shirt. “I have the key. I’m happiness. I fucking paid thirty-three dollars for you to gut me!”

“Julie…” Kari looked like she had something important to say, but she trailed off.

“Maybe I can shit it out. Maybe it’s far enough along already.” Julie scurried off to the far corner, pulled down her skirt and panties and squatted.

“You’re really gonna take a shit right there?”

“If there’s a chance you don’t have to gut me, fuck yeah I am.” Julie’s exquisitely beautiful face scrunched up and her chiseled jaw clenched as she squeezed her bowels with everything she had.

“Well make it fast, because we’re running out of time.” Kari flipped the lights back on and Julie lost any semblance of privacy, but she didn't really care.

In a strained voice, Julie replied, “Hand me a pair of those surgical gloves and that journal.” Kari obliged, taking a pair of gloves for herself as well, then she moved over to the steel table and released Sara from her binds. The blonde had died at some point while the girls were working out their latest puzzle, so she slumped limply to the floor once the leather straps were removed.

A chill went down Julie's spine as she realized Kari was getting the table ready for her. It was the sensible thing to do - if the key wasn’t in this pile of feces she was creating, they’d need to act quickly - but she still wished Kari had waited a bit longer.

Julie pulled the rubber gloves over her hands, and after pushing as much excrement through her asshole as she possibly could in the space of ninety seconds, she swiped at her crack with some crumpled up paper and got to work digging.

Terds were plucked apart with a feverish and steadily increasing desperation. She was fairly certain she would have felt a key sliding out her butt, so she didn’t really expect to find anything, but the thought of being disemboweled was too terrible to entertain.

“Julie… Julie, we’re running out of time.”

When Julie realized she was picking through the same piece of shit for the third time, she knew what had to be done. “Fuck! FUCK! Alright. Okay.” She pulled off the gloves and started towards the table. "There's a scalpel in that lockbox. Maybe you could use it? Try not to butcher me too badly, and then I can be stitched up when we make it out of here?"

"Yeah, okay. You got it. Let me strap you in first."

Julie stepped onto the outcrop at the foot of the table and stretched her arms up into the restraints, pulling her supple tummy taught. "Okay, Batman," she said, somehow finding the courage to smile. Kari secured her wrists and ankles, then removed the scalpel from the lockbox. Julie's white half shirt was pulled high on her perky young breasts, giving Kari a full view of her tender, white belly. The clock was fast approaching 3:35, and both girls took notice.

“Okay. Do it,” Julie said, biting her lip.

Kari obliged, pressing the tiny blade into her upper abdomen. It dimpled the creamy skin before it was swallowed up, bright red blood welling up in its place. Only the slightest of gasps escaped Julie’s soft lips, and Kari drew the scalpel sideways. It began in the left side of her stomach, close to an inch below her ribs, and ended up almost directly over her navel before it left her flesh.

The cut was not deep enough to penetrate the layers of fat and muscle below the skin, so Kari had to take the blade to her a second time, retracing it through the furrow. When it still wasn’t deep enough, Kari tried a third time. Finally the incision permeated the abdominal wall, and Kari was able to push her fingers through and find a sac-like internal organ, which she assumed was the stomach.

When she began to cut her way into the sac, Julie grunted and tried not to retch. Fingers and sharp metal poked and prodded in places they did not belong, and it was far more unpleasant than she imagined it would be.

“Shit, I can’t fucking see anything,” Kari complained.

“Are you sure that’s not my liver?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to read the Anatomy books. What does a liver look like?”

“Oooo fuck!” Julie suddenly upchucked blood as Kari cut something new open. “Yuh. You’re fucking me… up.” The blue-eyed beauty’s teeth were clinched and more blood sprayed from between them, her lips pulled back in a snarl.

“I’m sorry, Julie, I think I might be onto something. Hang in there.”

“It burns.”

Kari explored the smaller, adjacent sac as thoroughly as possible but found nothing. She glanced back at the clock and saw she had roughly five minutes to find the key. “Julie. I’m going to need to search your intestines, and we don’t have a lot of time.”

“Of course,” Julie croaked. Kari’s gloves and forearms were bright red with gore, and more of Julie’s blood was spattered all over her shirt and face. The gaping gash in Julie’s stomach was leaking fluid like a busted transmission, and the pain was immense. “I think I’m already dying.”

“I’m going to use the knife this time,” Kari explained, already having swapped the scalpel for the larger, less precise cutting tool, and she wasted no time in plunging the blade into Julie’s tummy.

“Oooof,” Julie exhaled heavily as she was stabbed. Kari used both hands as she pulled the knife downward through Julie’s guts, carving the larger girl open. When she was finished a gaping wound that began several inches above and to the left of Julie’s center, curved down below her navel and finished slightly to the right remained.

Pink ropes had already begun to spill out, and Kari grabbed hold of them and tugged. It wasn’t as easy as one might think, but Julie felt something give inside her and a messy tangle of plumbing slopped onto her skirt between her thighs. Kari hastily began unscrambling and cajoling the pink tubing, feeling for that evasive fucking key.

Julie watched it all with wide eyes and strained groans, morbidly enraptured by this spectacular mistreatment of her innards, and it didn’t take long for Kari’s search to become increasingly brutal. As time wore on and she failed to find the key, she gave no consideration to the girl to whom these intestines belonged. She wrenched them this way and that, sometimes slicing right through the viscera instead of working out a particularly troublesome tangle.

“You’re killing me,” Julie murmured through clinched teeth.

“No, I’m trying to save you. I only have a couple minutes to find the… wait. Wait! I think I felt it. I think I’ve got it!” The excitement in Kari’s voice was unmistakeable, and she ripped and sliced and diced until a small gore-covered key rattled onto the floor.

Even though her bowels were in tatters and mostly dangling between her legs, Julie allowed herself to hope. “You did it,” she breathed. “Thank God. Let me loose and let’s get outta here.”

But Kari was already at the door, shoving the key into the lock. “I need to get the door open first,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder as she turned the key. “I…” She stopped speaking and cried out softly as ten wide blades suddenly thrust forth from within the door and ran through her midsection.

They were vertical and lined up in two rows of five, with roughly one and a quarter inches in between them. The middle blade of the lower row was less than a centimeter to the right of her oval shaped belly button. In an instant they rotated forty-five degrees, ensuring the wounds wouldn’t close, rotated back, and retracted, and the edges of the blades were serrated, so when they left Kari’s lithe flesh they took bits of her with them.

It was a roller coaster of emotions, going from the tense and traumatizing race against the clock to the relief of finding the key to the horror of having her guts shredded. Kari turned around and Julie could see the devastation and defeat on her friend's lovely face. "Oh fuck," Kari muttered, clutching her belly and sliding down, her back to the door, until her soft buttocks touched the floor.

"Did we run out of time?" Julie asked, looking at the clock. She could have sworn they had at least a minute or two left.

"It's the wrong key," Kari said miserably, and she hooked a thumb through a loop of her own entrails and pulled. "Happiness inside you. It's not addressed to you. It would have a comma…" she winced as she pulled even more of the viscera from her midriff, "after happiness. It's addressed to me. Happiness inside me. You inside me… is the key."

Julie's eyes widened and her mouth gaped as she understood. "I was supposed to pick through [i]your[/i] guts."

Kari nodded, feeling up the several feet of small intestines she now held in her lap.

"Let me loose. I can help."

"There's no time," Kari answered. In truth, there was no time for even Kari to somehow find and extract the key from her own insides, then make an escape, and they both knew it. The clock had already moved beyond 4:45, but neither of them were ready to face that fact.

Not twenty seconds passed, with Kari pulling more and more of her bowels from her belly, before the intercom sounded their doom. “Your time is up. You have failed to escape within the allotted sixty minute window. You will now be locked in this room until you are no longer living.” They heard the dead bolts engaging inside the door as those chilling words filled the air. “Thank you for participating in the first ever life and death escape room. We hope you enjoyed the experience.”

“Best thirty-three bucks I ever spent,” Julie said with a smirk. When Kari gave her a quizzical look, she added. “What? A wise-ass bitch once told me you hafta keep your sense of humor in a time of crisis.”

Kari tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. Instead she smiled sadly and answered, “You’re right. I’m going to write a rave review on Yelp.”

“Me too.” Julie looked down at the mess that had been made of her belly and sighed. “The escape room queen, killed by a comma.”

“Lack of a comma,” Kari corrected her.

“You knew the whole time. You were gonna tell me… but you didn’t.”

“I saw what you did to Sara. I didn’t want you to do that to me.”

“Neither did I,” Julie agreed.

“I was hoping you were right… and I was wrong. I’m so sorry, Julie.” More tears reddened Kari’s hazel eyes.

“It doesn’t matter.” [i]Nothing matters anymore.[/i] Julie almost said that second sentence out loud, but decided to keep it to herself.

“Oh, it hurts so bad. Why target our stomachs?”

“They’re probably perverts. Just waiting for a couple of cute girls to come in so they could gut them.”

They both bled in silence for the next several minutes, tortured by thoughts of their rapidly approaching mortality. They were at that stage in life where death was something that always happened to other people, and they didn’t really believe it could ever happen to them. At least until now.

“Julie, do you think there’s a heaven?”

Julie gave her pal a pensive look, “I fucking hope there is.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t know, Kari. I just… don’t know.” What Julie wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say, was deep down she didn’t believe. No matter how badly she wanted to.

“What if this is really it? Like this is all we get?”

“That would fucking suck,” Julie agreed.

“I’m so scared, Julie.” Kari’s lush lower lip was trembling, and her perfect, creamy skin had gone ghostly pale and waxy. She was sitting in a huge pool of blood that was growing at a grim rate.

Julie, who was actually terrified herself, didn’t know how to comfort her friend, so she tried to make light of the situation. “Yeah, no shit you’re scared. We’re fucking dying.” It was meant to be funny, but it came across as mean-spirited, and it was clear Kari didn’t appreciate the dark humor. Incidentally, it was the last thing she ever said to her friend.

“Julie… Jooo…” Kari’s big beautiful eyes bulged in her skull, and Julie watched all the terror and panic and desolation fade away, leaving a blank and lifeless stare. Kari was gone, and only a corpse remained.

Julie held on for another six endless minutes, left to endure the tortuous agony in her belly and the horror of her fading young life all by herself. Then she too faded away into oblivion.

This is a rewrite of the first story I posted online, like 10 years ago. Hope you like it.

The Hitchhiker

It had been a great day so far for Julie Huerta. It was a Friday, she had felt very comfortable with her Physics exam in sixth period, she had crushed it in basketball practice, and Vinny had finally found the balls to talk to her. That conversation had been both intriguing and stimulating to say the least, and they had tentatively set up a date for this weekend.

To top it all off, it was snowing. While snow was an annoyance for some, for kids in the New Mexico desert it was a rare treat. Julie wasn’t exactly a kid, but she wasn’t too old to build a snowman or smack her brother in the face with a snowball, and if her luck held, the snowfall would continue all night and into the morning. When Cyndi Lauper began to belt out Girls Just Wanna Have Fun from the car radio, Julie couldn't help but sing along. Unfortunately it seemed not everyone was having as great a time as she was.

Through the shifting veil of snow shuffled the muddled shape of a man. As Julie approached the figure this man's terrible misfortune became painfully more apparent. Wrapped tightly around his body was a light wind-breaker; the type of garment better suited for a stroll through the park on a sunny autumn day. It offered very little protection against the frigid air on an unforgiving day like today. The man's chin was tucked tightly against his chest, his arms hugging his body, in an effort to preserve what little body heat he might still be retaining. Narrow legs clothed in thin slacks and capped with leather loafers trudged stubbornly through drifts of snow alongside the road.

Julie's heart went out to the man. She could not remember passing one single vehicle since she had piloted her yellow VW Beetle onto this barren stretch of pavement. Realizing that they were still at least ten miles from town, she pulled onto the shoulder. It was the only humane thing to do. Watching in her rear view mirror, she saw the man's face light up as he hustled to her passenger door. She leaned over and yanked the handle, popping the door open. A cold blast of air rushed over her, instantly dropping the temperature inside the bug ten degrees or more.

There, outside her vehicle in the wintry air, stood a strikingly handsome, clean shaven man who appeared to be in his early thirties. A sheepish grin shown from his windblown, cherry red face. Dark, guarded eyes peered up at her as she studied his wonderfully symmetrical features.

An overwhelming impulse to stomp on the gas pedal, peel out of there, and never look back washed over Julie, but she quickly shook it off. That was nuts. She couldn't drive off and leave this poor man standing here like this.

"Need a lift," Julie asked coolly.

The man said nothing, but he climbed into the car with liquid speed and agility.

"It's fucking cold out there, huh?" Julie offered. The man smiled. Julie was still not completely comfortable cursing in the presence of adults and it pleased her that this man was not put off by her use of the 'f' word.

Beaming at her own maturity, Julie extended her hand. "My name's Julie." The man looked at her hand for a moment before seizing it with his own sturdy grip. His hands were deathly cold from the icy weather outside.

"You're very beautiful, Julie," the man told her. It was true, Julie was amazing. Every inch, every curve of her soft, young, athletic body was perfectly proportioned to her five foot six, one-hundred thirty pound frame. Rich, shoulder-length, chocolate-colored hair spilled down around her high cheek bones and squared jaw, while her lush lips, sparkling blue eyes, square chin, and celestial nose completed the most stunning face to ever grace man’s existence. Her flawless body was wrapped in a fair, pink skin so smoothly complected it might have been stolen from a new born’s ass. Much of that skin was presently on display, as she had swapped her shorts for sweats but opted to remain in her practice top, a sleeveless half shirt with the number thirty-four printed on it, which meant her belly and shoulders were bare despite the freezing temperatures. It was impossible to even imagine such beauty, but something about this man’s comment struck Julie as odd.

Perhaps it was the way he said it, with a hint of regret and sadness. As Julie tried to pin down what exactly was off, the man released her hand and produced a Heckler & Koch HK45 from the confines of his jacket. He moved in the same smooth, fluid motion he had used to climb aboard Julie's ride.

No stranger to deftness and dexterity, Julie averaged nearly three steals a game her sophomore year. Her hands moved lightning quick, but she had just managed to grab the barrel of the gun and only slightly alter the angle in which it was pointed before flames flashed, a deafening boom filled the car, and Julie cried out in surprise.

Warm pressure began to build in her guts and she tasted metal in the back of her throat. A thousand thoughts raced in her mind at once - the most prominent one being, [i]Am I going to die?[/i] It just didn't seem possible. It all seemed so surreal, like a bad dream. As she sought to solidify her grip on the gun, it bucked in her hands again and she felt the pressure in her abdomen swell to something greater.

[i]I've gotta stop the slide,[/i] she thought, and when the gun went off a third time she succeeded. More lead smacked violently into her belly and ripped through her bowels, but the slide was held in the back position, unable to chamber a new round. Julie kept her right hand firmly in place and brought her left thumb up into the handsome bastard's eye. She had the satisfaction of hearing him scream before his left fist clouted her in the side of the head.

It took a second to shake out the cobwebs, and when she regained her senses the hitchhiker was rubbing his eye and recklessly waving his weapon at her. She flinched back against the door as another shot boomed, and she felt the impact in her right shoulder.

[i]So much for stealing his gun.[/i]

She decided that she had to get out of there; she had to get out of the bug and away from this man. As she turned to open her door she saw that the bullets had passed clean through her body. Her blood was splashed across the handle of the driver's side door and she could see a couple of holes in the paneling. She pushed open the door and gingerly stepped out into the snow.

Another booming shot rang out behind her. The slug entered the small of her back, furrowed through her intestines, exited her belly, and careened off the pavement on the other side of the road. She squawked and stumbled to the ground as more of her blood sprayed from her body.

Julie struggled awkwardly to get back to her feet while clutching the numerous holes in her midriff. There was a tight trio of entry wounds around her navel - left, right, and above - and an exit wound nearly the size of a fifty cent piece farther off in the left side of her gut. Blood was pouring over her hands and between her knuckles. The taste of it filled her mouth and she spat red. Leaning against the car for support, she managed to stand.

[i]Am I dying?[/i] she wondered. [i]Am I really dying?[/i]

With her tiny hands splayed across her tummy, Julie tried to run. Normally she was one of the fastest girls on the basketball team, but while there was nothing wrong with her legs, the fire in her belly made her ungainly and the most she could achieve was a graceless lumber. She was around ten yards beyond the rear bumper when she heard the crack of another gunshot behind her.

Her right leg went stiff as a bullet punched through her thigh. Another shot quickly followed, and Julie caught it with her perfectly rounded right butt cheek. An exit wound exploded in her hip, severely hobbling the beautiful teen, but she continued to limp forward, desperate to outrun her fate. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the bastard had gotten out of her car and was now pointing his pistol at her.

"No no no no no no no no no," Julie muttered in a panicky little voice. The hitchhiker clearly had no intention of letting her escape. This was so fucking bad.

Another pair of gunshots rang out in the quiet desert air, and both rounds found their mark in Julie's lower back and punched fresh holes in her midriff. A gurgling sound escaped her throat and she sank to her knees. Her eyes grew wide with disbelief as she examined the latest exit wounds in her belly. The two holes were a couple inches right of her navel, one just above the other, spilling alarming amounts of blood down the front of her sweat pants. Spurts jettisoned from her wounds in rhythm with her heartbeat and landed steaming in the snow before her. She kept both palms pressed against her belly, but it did little to slow the bleeding. Her guts burned with intense discomfort.

"Ah fuck!" Julie squealed, her voice rising shrilly in terror. Another slug ripped through her, spraying more of her precious blood from just beneath her right breast. Her back arched as the bullet pierced her body, then she twisted and fell forward, pressing her right hand against the ground to support herself. She coughed up more blood and swiped the drips from her lips with her free hand.

"Oh Gawd," she muttered miserably. The pain was terrible, but it was better than feeling nothing at all. She began to straighten her back and try to get her feet back under her when she was shot again, this bullet catching her in the back of her left shoulder and tearing through the tender flesh below her collar bone. She cried out and spun with the force of the shot, ending up with her back in the snow and her legs twisted beneath her.

Her killer was now quickly approaching, swapping an empty click for a fresh one he had found inside his jacket. She turned her stunning blue eyes upon herself, dismayed to see what had become of her healthy, young, seventeen-year-old body. All of her wounds were bleeding profusely. Her white top and gray sweats were soaked. The snow beneath her was stained an ugly red.

"Oh God, lookit me," Julie moaned. Her eyes widened as the man pulled back the slide and chambered a fresh round. "Oh shit," she mumbled.

Her tennis shoes scuffed at the snow as she tried to scoot backwards, desperate to get away from this psycho and his gun, when he plugged her high in the abdomen. The bullet smashed into the soft flesh beneath her sternum, pummeled the tissue and organs housed there, chipped off a piece of her spine, and exited the center of her back. She coughed up another mouthful of blood and grunted in agony.

"Fuck, you fucking bastard," she gasped, a split second before the bastard shot her in the chest. The bullet left a hole in the top of the three over her right breast, and it also must have punctured a lung, because Julie suddenly found it increasingly difficult to breathe.

Still intent on resisting her fate, her animal instincts still locked in the flight of survival, she sighed tiredly, flipped onto her knees and elbows and began to scuttle away from her Beetle and her killer.

She managed to cover maybe three or four feet of ground before she was shot for the fourteenth time. The bullet chewed into her back and left an exit wound the size of a sand dollar where her left nipple used to be. Her plight was becoming grimmer by the second. Blood spewed from her lips, she muttered, “Oh fuck,” and she dragged her dying body forward another foot or two.

The gun barked for the fifteenth time that day, and Julie felt her left shoulder pulverized and smashed by hot lead. Her arms gave out and her face ended up in the snow, but she continued trying to pull herself forward. She was still struggling to find her grip when the handsome hitchhiker’s boot nuzzled against her ribs and flipped her onto her back.

Her bewitching blue eyes blinked against the snow, staring up into the barrel of a gun. [i]Is this it? Is he gonna blow my head off now?[/i] Her brows arched and her perfect face grimaced in terror, and she begged for mercy, “Please. Please no.”

The man hesitated, the gun wavering ever so slightly, and then he exhaled heavily. “I’m sorry, Julie.” He knelt beside her and began rummaging through the pockets of her sweat pants. All he found was her Samsung flip phone and her lip gloss. “A flip phone?!” He seemed insulted.

Julie tried to answer him, but she spit up blood instead. If she had been able to speak, she’d have told him he sounded like her friends. Everyone was always busting her chops for it ([i]Who are you calling, Julie? 2005?[/i]), but her parents weren’t well off, and she didn’t need to be on Twitter and Instagram all the time like the other girls in her school.

“Don’t you have a wallet?”

Julie gurgled and coughed and let a torrent of blood spill from the corners of her mouth before she replied, “It’s on the dash. I think there’s like thirteen bucks in there.” She was amazed at the tranquility and steadiness in her voice. It sounded as if they were discussing the weekend weather forecast over a cup of tea, even though in Julie’s mind she was desperately throwing water out of a sinking ship.

“Thirteen dollars? You bitch! You stupid fucking cunt!” The bastard kicked her in the jaw.

“I wanted to help you,” Julie protested.

“Help me?” the man asked, and he punctuated his question by shooting Julie in her perky right tit, inside the upper arc of the three this time.

“Oof,” Julie grunted.

“Do you have twenty-thousand dollars somewhere? Because that would fucking help me.” He shot her again, in the lower curve of her right breast, near the middle tip of the three.

It was then that Julie understood that she was dying for nothing. This man was in debt to some dangerous people, and he would not be able to pay them back. Despite the fact that he was killing her, it was easy to empathize with his situation. After all, he was just trying to survive, and as she lay there staring death in the face, she knew what that was like.

“Take my car,” she told him. She lifted her head to look at her bullet-riddled body before adding, “I’m not gonna need it anymore.”

“That piece of shit isn’t worth five hundred dollars, and now it’s full of blood and bullet holes. Nobody will buy it.”

Julie loved that car. Her parents had bought it for her on her sixteenth birthday, and it cost them countless hours of overtime and working weekends. It was a representation of their devotion to her, so hearing this man call it a piece of shit stung her. She laid her head back in the snow, licked the blood from her lips, and rolled her sparkling blue eyes. “Well, I guess you killed me for thirteen bucks then.”

“Hardly even worth the ammo I spent on you.” The man seemed to consider putting one more round in her, and Julie wondered if she’d feel the bullet caving in her forehead or if everything would just suddenly come to an end before she even realized it. In the end the man just took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, Julie. You shouldn’t have stopped.” Then he turned and left her for dead.

She heard the door to her bug slam shut and raised her head just enough to see her beloved yellow VW Beetle disappear into the snow. [i]I shouldn't have stopped,[/i] she thought. [i]Oh God, what I wouldn't do to rewind the clock by two minutes and just not stop.[/i] Sadly, there were no second chances this time, and she understood with absolute certainty that this is where she would die.

Her mind returned to the conversation she had with Vinny that morning. Ironically, they had discussed how fleeting life can be, and how important it is to cherish every moment. In hindsight, it seemed almost prescient.

Vinny had told her that the average life span was around eighty years, which meant they only got eighty springs, eighty summers, eighty autumns, eighty winters, eighty birthdays. [i]I want so badly to have eighty birthdays.[/i] He had been watching a video on YouTube, a Ted Talk maybe, and it had inspired him. It was what motivated him to finally tell her how he felt. He told her that she gave him hope, that the world was a little brighter because it had people like her in it, that she made him feel so many things at once it was overwhelming.

They had both agreed to live in the moment and to stop stressing over petty, insignificant things that wouldn't make a difference in the end. Still, no matter how stirring that discussion had been and how much weight she had given Vinny's words, she never imagined that this would be that end; that she wouldn't even live to see another sunset.

For some reason her killer had left her flip phone in the snow beside her. It was probably the same reason he had shot her seventeen times without managing to hit her heart even once - he wasn't cut out for this sort of thing. The reason didn't really matter though, it fell into the category of insignificant things that wouldn't make a difference in the end. What mattered was the phone was here, and she intended to use it.

There was no point in calling nine-one-one. They couldn't save her and she didn't want to spend her last moments talking to a stranger. Her parents would both be at work and wouldn't be able to answer her call, so she recalled the number Vinny had given her that morning and dialed it.

As the phone rang she considered how amazing a simple thing like a memory was. It was something she always took for granted, but there was so much information and experience and emotion in her memories, and soon it would all be gone. All of it lost forever, as she would cease to exist. It was a devastating thought.

"Hello?" It was Vinny's voice, made distorted and metallic by technology, but Vinny nonetheless.

"Vinny, I'm dying."

"What?! Is this Julie?"

"Yep. I…" A convulsion overtook her mid-sentence, but once she got it under control she continued, "I’m fucking bleeding to death."

"Julie, that’s not funny. Don't even play like that."

"I'm dead serious," and Julie chortled at the unintentional pun.

"You’re not fucking with me?"

“I wish I was.” There was a moment of silence from Vinny’s side of the connection, and Julie tried to imagine what he must be thinking. It had to be a mind-blowing call to receive.

“Julie, you gotta hang in there. Where are you?”

“Lying on the side of the road like fucking road kill.”

“Did you call an ambulance?”

“Vinny, I’m fucked. They’d never make it in time.”

“Is it really that bad? What happened?”

“I got shot to fucking shit. A bullet for every year of my life. My stomach looks like swiss fucking cheese." Julie lifted her head again to look at herself, as if to reaffirm what she was saying. A part of her was still in disbelief.

“You got shot? Who shot you?”

“Just some guy. Doesn’t matter. Don’t sweat the small stuff, remember? I didn’t call you to talk about him.”

“It’s not small stuff, Julie. He shot you.”

“Yeah, seventeen fucking times. I don’t want vengeance or justice or any of that bullshit. What I really want is to live, but… that’s not happening. Listen…” Julie felt the world fading, and she forgot what she was saying. All she could think about was the crushing finality of it all.

“Julie.”

Vinny’s metallic voice was in another world as despair took hold of her. [i]This is it. This is really it. There’s nothing left.[/i] A snowflake landed in her eye, and she blinked at the tears spilling down her temples. [i]It’s so beautiful.[/i] She was staring up at the wintry sky - a blanket of gray dotted with floating white flakes. [i]I won’t get to play in the snow. I won’t be able to enjoy this beauty ever again.[/i]

“Julie?”

It was that voice again, from somewhere far away. She remembered the boy she had called. The boy with whom she had connected earlier that day. It was too late. It wasn’t fair. Everything was being taken from her.

“Julie, are you there?!” Vinny’s voice was loud and panicked.

Julie’s response was soft and trembling with emotion, but she still sounded remarkably calm. “Yes. You were right. Life is too short. Way too short…” She had wanted to tell him something, but what? Did it even matter? Does anything matter when you’re dead? “You should…” Julie licked her lips and summoned all her strength. “You should have asked me out years ago. Don’t make that mistake again. Don’t… keep things inside.”

“Julie, I’m sorry.” He was crying. “Please don’t die.”

“I don’t want to…” It was the last thing she said. Her words trailed off, but she still clung stubbornly to her life, struggling mightily to fill her ruined lungs again and again.

It took several minutes for her to finally bleed out, and she suffered immensely. Vinny remained on the phone, calling out to her every few seconds, but she could no longer respond. She made choked gurgling sounds often enough for him to know she was still there, but it was not an attempt to communicate. Vinny and her phone were forgotten. All her efforts were focused on the continuation of her existence.

[i]I wanted to help. This is how my kindness was repaid. I can’t believe this shit.[/i] It was her last coherent thought before her consciousness descended into delirium. Soon after, her jaw wrenched in agony, her perfect, full lips parted, as she finally fell back into her death throes. Her back arched and her blood-stained tennis shoes dug at the snow. This went on for close to ten seconds. Then Julie lay still. She was dead at last. It was a terrible death that no one could possibly deserve, especially one as young, innocent, and naïve as Julie.

Ah, I remember that one from a long time ago. Indeed, I think it was the first story I read by you.Really cool to see it remade / reapproached like this.Am I right in assuming the mahor difference is the whole wallet / phone call scenes? At least I don't recall those. Maybe she got shot more times? I think it was 17, though.. it IS Julie after all, I wouldn't be surprised to see her still somehow managing to walk after 30 shots, haha! That's just how she goes… her stubbornness and determination knows no equal. That's why she's so great for these stories. :-)

Forgive me if I'm not remembering details of the original story, it's been a long time since I read it.

Yeah, in the original version it was just a serial killer that she picked up, and she was shot 18 times instead of 17. Also, it was a .357 revolver used in the original (reloaded twice to total 18 shots), and there was no phone call at the end. She just laid there and bled out while her killer watched.

I’m glad you’re enjoying my stuff. I saw some of your posts on the hard core thread, and those are some cool images. If I ever get around to writing it, I’ve got a Jurassic Park type scenario in mind for Julie that would probably be right up your alley.

Bellystabber, feel free to email me, but I don’t talk much online. If you want to share stories or ideas for stories with me, I’m open to it.